Yorkshire Baptists

Yorkshire Baptists. The following account is taken from W. E. Blomfield, “Yorkshire Baptist Churches in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in C. E. Shipley, ed., The Baptists of Yorkshire: Being the Centenary Memorial Volume of the Yorkshire Baptist Association (Bradford and London: [n.d.], 1912), 53-118. 

“Churches of this early period were very small in numbers.  If we take the largest of them, and come as far down as 1798, we find Salendine Nook the largest of the churches with only 130 members, Bradford with under 100, Leeds with 70, Rawdon with 50, Sutton with about the same number, Gildersome with 47, Barnoldswick with 32.  Many had a membership of under a score.  Then the people were uninfluential.  For a large part of the period there were very few meeting houses.  Worship was held in the woods, in barns, in private houses, and at first we might almost say ‘in caves and holes of the earth.’ In Bradford the sanctuary was a licensed cockpit.  The people were too poor to buy benches, and worshippers carried their stools under their arms.  At Queenshead, the meeeting house was part of an inn, at Driffield a brewery, at Hull an old tower.  Dr. Fawcett, a leader in the denomination, had £25 a year; many ministers had to eke out their livelihood by manual labours during the week.  Then the ministers were generally ‘unlearned and ignorant men’---almost entirely so in the original sense of the words, and sometimes in a more serious sense too.  They had no college education.   There was about one Baptist Academy in the kingdom, and that far away.  Many of the ministers had never been to school.  They were emphatically self taught.  Books were a luxury and largely inaccessible to men so poor.  The Churches were frowned upon by all the powers and authorities, they were fettered by cruel persecuting laws, and to the end of the 18th century they received only scanty toleration.    . . . And we may say the foundations of our Yorkshire Churches were laid by humble poor uncultured [men.  How abundant has been the harvest from the seed they sowed in pain and tears!  They maintained their unflinching testimony to the principles of civil and religious liberty. . .”   (109-11).