Richard Mutton [Motton]

Richard Mutton [Motton] was a pawnbroker in Falmouth. He was baptized by Philip Gibbs, the Baptist minister at Plymouth, on 25 June 1769, and became a member of the Baptist meeting at Chacewater, which was organized in September 1769. The Baptist church at Falmouth was formed shortly thereafter, and the two congregations met as one until June 1772, when the Falmouth congregation was granted a dismissal to form its own congregation, much to the disappointment of the Chacewater congregation. Richard and Mary Mutton signed as members of the new Falmouth church. Neither meeting was able to support a minister for some time, and both were supplied for several years by students from Bristol, including a young John Rippon in July of 1771. The two congregations were reunited briefly again in 1776; they would share ministers at other times as well during the remainder of the eighteenth century. See The Universal British Directory, 5 vols. (London: Printed for the Patentees [Peter Barfoot and John Wilkes], and sold by Champanye and Whitrow, Jewry Street, Aldgate, 1791-1798), 3:99; Leonard Alfred Fereday, The Story of the Falmouth Baptists, with Some Account of Cornish Baptist Beginnings (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1950), 42-50.