A Baptist Church in Eccles, Lancashire, 1831-1842

Conclusions

Perhaps the most obvious comment to make at the outset is, that we see how much it is possible to glean from what might seem at first sight to be a sparse and unpromising record. There is also the wider question, already raised above, of the significance of such records at the time of writing. The Eccles document is by no means unique. When public registration of births, marriages and deaths began in mid-1837, nonconformist records were called in and quite a large number were surrendered, apparently voluntarily.[104]  Did Baptist churches promptly cease to keep birth registers?

There is nothing to indicate that this church had any antecedents. That is, we know of no other Baptist congregation in Eccles before 1831, nor of any other nearby, nor is there any sign that this one originated by transfer of membership from some other church. The point is worth making, as nonconformist churches quite often did spread through an area in that way: a church would form, it would attract members from a considerable distance, and when there were several from the same district, they would formally separate and establish a new church. The strongest evidence that we are dealing here with an entirely new foundation comes from the names and residences of the members as far as we have been able to ascertain them. They are overwhelmingly local:  all the adult families except one live within the township of Barton-upon-Irwell, and they are concentrated in the village of Eccles and hamlets of Patricroft and Barton. The exception is the Bent family, in Pendleton township, and even they may not be an exception, as the township boundary runs within a few hundred yards of the Eccles village centre - see Figure 1.

More striking still are the names:  Barlow, Brittain, Crompton, Henshaw, Moss, Parr...  All of them were, and some still are, prominent in the district. They are found in records for several centuries back and for a good many miles around. There is little doubt that most of these people spring from long-established farming families, even though only one of them (John Barrow) is known to have been a farmer himself.

The social composition of the group also emerges fairly clearly. We have shopkeepers and craftsman with trades that would have involved training if not formal apprenticeship; also a number of weavers, a trade of lower status – but only one labourer, or two if we count the husband of Isabella Willcock.^[105] 

It is hard to measure the strength of their commitment to the specific religious position of the Baptists. As mentioned at the outset, church and chapel-going was not a dominant feature of Eccles life at the time, however much it may have increased later. One may imagine that attachment to a Baptist church, with its very distinctive and public initiation ceremony, would be a relatively serious matter, especially considering that for those with any inclination to attend a place of worship, there were convenient alternatives, in the Independent chapel at Patricroft, and several Methodist churches.  We have already noted evidence that the Parr family or families had a dissenting connection of some long standing, as indicated by their choice of names. Another indication is that in several later burials, their graves have epitaphs which are exact quotations from Scripture, complete with chapter and verse references.^[106]

We can also see something of the extent of social ties within the group. Figure 3 shows how some families are near neighbours in the same street; we have noted some related by marriage; some members of different families who witnessed one another’s marriages; and who witnessed the namings of each other’s children. The pattern of witnessing is particularly informative: about half of the individuals who witness do so only one occasion, and about a third of the namings are witnessed mainly by these once-only witnesses. It suggests that some families were, relatively, outsiders, or if not, they tended to invite friends to the naming who were not strong devotees of the chapel. Conversely it identifies some who were particularly regular in attendance.

Even if we discount the names of people who appear only once in the record, the distribution of larger and smaller families, older and younger generations, married and single people, looks reasonable for a population in a rapidly growing working district. It would be interesting to check it against statistics for Eccles in general in that period. The people we meet most clearly in the record are the young couples of childbearing age; their average age on marriage turns out to have been in the low twenties for the women, mid to high twenties for the men. As far as one can judge from the census data, the size of their families may have a been little low compared with most families in the district. (The Wilcock family, with at least nine children, is the exception which makes this point most clearly).

Matching what we know against general population statistics for the period, we can guess, very roughly, the total adult chapel attendance.  The birth rate for England at that time was 36 per thousand per annum.^[107] The record of 24 births in six years, i.e. four per year on average, would imply a population of (4.0/36) x 1000, i.e. 110 persons of all ages.  Since the record stretches over a period of time, albeit a short one, what it really means is that some 110 persons “passed through” the congregation in that time. The figure is reasonably consistent with the other information we have. The first official figures, at a time when church officials were already worrying about a decline, show 58 church members. This almost certainly means people who have been formally admitted by baptism or by transfer from some other church where they had been baptised. Normally, there would be a much larger number of people who attended regularly but were not members in this full sense: it would be quite normal for a congregation to be two or even three times as many as the membership. For a congregation of around a hundred the figure of 50 children of school age seems large, but we can assume that many parents would happy then, as they were later, to send their children to Sunday school without themselves regularly going to chapel.

How did the church come to be established in Eccles in the first place?  and why did it apparently end so soon? We might ask first, what led the Giles family to the north of England, but nothing has turned up so far to answer that. We can only note that at roughly the same time we find two more of Giles senior’s sons working in Lancashire and Yorkshire.^[108]  Did they have relatives already there?  Was there a connection with the Manchester business fraternity, and particularly with the Leese family? As to Eccles, we can only guess that the location of Giles junior’s church was a by-product of his other profession as a schoolmaster. Once having decided to move north, he would have had to assess the prospects of a fee-paying school, and Patricroft with its (then) rural setting, good communications, and grand-sounding residence, must have seemed a reasonable choice. Certainly Giles made strenuous efforts in his prospectus to convince the public that this was so. We do not know how well he succeeded, but we do know how rapidly the area changed its character with the advance of industrialisation. Perhaps Giles was effectively forced to move on. We can suppose that he had substantial financial backing for his venture, and was obliged to see that his sponsors did not lose by it. In the late 1830s there was a sudden economic depression in the industrial north, and in the early 1840s it got worse.^[109] We can imagine that for some parents, private education became a luxury they could not afford. It was in rural and affluent Cheshire that his business finally became viable.

Does Giles’s move away from Eccles reflect adversely on his commitment to an evangelical ministry? It seems fair to say no to this, at least on the basis of the little information we have. There can never have been any question of the Eccles congregation supporting a full-time paid minister, certainly not a young one with a family of his own. Nor, having moved to a full-time job in Manchester, could he reasonably have continued as a settled minister in Eccles. He does seem to have made himself available for that purpose later on in Liverpool and Chester. There is no reason to think that such an opportunity came up during his short period in Manchester. We know he attended the Particular Baptist chapel and was a great admirer of the noted minister there, William Gadsby. Gadsby himself lived until 1844.^[110] By that time Giles was at Liverpool and in the same year he issued a pamphlet of two sermons – which he had printed at Manchester by John Gadsby.

There are several indications that Giles was an effective and valued preacher. He was of course well educated and a teacher of elocution among other things. His speaking abilities were remembered by acquaintances from his days in Chatham,^[111] and he was remembered with affection by pupils from both Chatham^[112] and Patricroft.^[113] He seems to have attracted a sizeable congregation in Eccles with no known prior base to work from, and the sad comment on his departure bears this out.  Finally, we have the testimony of one his “converts” at Liverpool, Elizabeth Bennett, ^[114]  later Elizabeth Vaughan, whose family remained attached the Gadsbyite churches.^[115]

Two Baptist historians have implied that there was continuity between Giles’s Eccles church and the congregation of Particular Baptists that grew up in Patricroft in the 1860s and established themselves with a chapel in Byron Street. Whitley in 1913 included Eccles in a catalogue of early Baptist churches in the North-West of England, and stated that it was “now represented at Byron Street”.^[116] Later S. F. Paul (1961) reviewed the origins of the Byron Street cause and also referred it back to the earlier church.^[117] Both writers were in a position to consult records, of the General and Particular Baptist denominations respectively, but it is not known if they actually did find contemporary evidence on this point. Records do exist of the foundation of the Baptist (not Particular Baptist) Church in Eccles in 1876, but although there are many names in the earliest minute books, none of them coincide with names in the older register.^[118]  For the present the suggestion of continuity can only remain a suggestion. It is based on the minister’s theological position, with its clear leaning to the “Gadsbyite” side, and on the fact that one family, that of Barrow, is known to have become attached to the later church.

During Giles’s tenure the Eccles church was showing a healthy number of young couples and a good promise of growth in the future. It will be interesting to know how it compares with other church communities at that time, and what became of the congregation in the next few decades.

© Roderick D. Cannon.