3. The Constituency

Transcription of article in the series “How We Won East Anglia” by J.C. Mantripp

GEORGE BORROW, in his preface to “The Bible in Spain,” says: “I advance no claim to an intimate acquaintance with the Spanish nobility . . . however, I have had the honour to live on familiar terms with the peasants, shepherds, and muleteers of Spain, whose bread and bacalao I have eaten, who always treated me with kindness and courtesy, and to whom I have not unfrequently been indebted for shelter and protection.”

Those who came to plant Primitive Methodism in East Anglia could tell a similar story. Their ministry was to those whom others had neglected, and among these they gained the materials to build the Church they established. Such opposition as arose came generally from men of good social position. If the rabble persecuted the preacher it was generally at the instigation of local magnates. In the towns a few people of higher social standing were arrested by the preacher’s earnestness, and in rural districts the village shopkeeper or some farmer would be won, but in general our work was among the common people, “the poor, and those who had no helper.” At Wisbech a tinker was the first to welcome the preachers and provide a preaching-room.

The preachers themselves were men of the people. W.G. Bellham was called from the shipwrights’ yard. James Thurgar was a shoemaker who, while a Wesleyan local preacher, laboured under the conviction that his sphere of service was too narrow for the burning zeal he had for the salvation of souls, and embraced the opportunity given him by Mr. Steele, the superintendent of Fakenham Circuit, to enter our ministry. George Rouse was engaged in agricultural work when, at the age of eighteen, his home circuit called him to the ministry. This is his record: “As his father is a farmer he has been brought up in that way. He has been a member in our Society four years, and on the plan two years. His conduct has been good, his piety sound, and he has been useful to two or three poor sinners that we have knowledge of. He has a mind capable of im‘provement, and if he keeps humble and lives to God we have no doubt he will make his way.” These were not men of brilliant intellectual attainments, although they were not without intellectual power. Nor were the people whom they gathered into societies without intellectual concern.

A minute concerning a young preacher reads: ‘“We earnestly recommend to him close application to study, and diligence in all other duties, that he may become an acceptable and efficient minister amongst us.” None who have studied the old Circuit records can be under the delusion that education was at a discount amongst our early preachers and officials. But what gave these men such great influence was the fact that they belonged to the people. They knew the misery and the hopelessness of the masses, and they knew “the way out.” Let them get the opportunity to tell what they knew, and the response to their message would be as that of the tinder to the spark.

The conditions under which the people lived in both town and country gave ample proof that reform was necessary. Ignorance, brutality and crime abounded. Contemporary history, as well as the journals of the preachers, reveal the degrading conditions that obtained. Dr. Jessop says that “during the nine years ending with 1808 there were committed to the four prisons of Wymondham, Norwich, Aylsham and Walsingham, 2,336 men and women, to whom we may be sure little mercy was shown.” This was before Primitive Methodism came to East Anglia, but in the years following Waterloo the conditions were worse, especially in the villages, where many of our hardest battles were fought and many of our greatest victories won.

The lot of the villager was hard, and there were many signs of discontent. Low wages and starvation prices made him sullen and sometimes vindictive. When sixpence was taken to the bakers “and you got your half-quartern loaf and a halfpenny change! People didn’t live then, they just lingered.” A Circuit Report of those days states: “Many of the friends have been out.of employment and some necessitated to go to the workhouse.”

The rural districts were in a state of semi-heathenism. Hunger had made men reckless. Sabbath-breakers, thieves and poachers were numerous. Robert Key’s description of the condition of Mid-Norfolk may seem too extravagant for sober history, but those who look upon the village chapel as an ugly blot on rural life, and who profess to find in Primitive Methodism “the great encourager of intellectual snobbishness, artistic dearth, sentimentality and mawkishness,” would do well to ponder the following statement: “One dark, dismal mantle covered the whole, and the devil had it all his own way.”

To the people living in these conditions the Primitive Methodist preacher brought the message of salvation, and soon a transformation took place. A travelling showman coming to Westleton in Suffolk, where, during a former visit, he had gathered a profitable audience on the village green, found that he could attract no people. Enquiring the reason, he was told: “You have come two years too late. The Primitives have come and converted the whole village.” In the towns also it was the workers, to whose spiritual needs other Churches had been indifferent, whom our Church attracted. George Borrow says of the Norwich Camp Meeting: “The crowd consisted entirely of the lower classes, labourers and mechanics, and their wives and children—dusty people, unwashed people, people of no account whatever, and yet they did not look like a mob.”

After the work had become established and the effects of godliness were evident in improved social conditions, Robert Key would humorously refer to this change in his camp-meeting addresses:—“When I first knew you, it would have taken several of you to have bought a donkey, but here you come respectably dressed, like ladies and gentlemen, driving your gigs and traps and fine horses.” Farmers and shopkeepers and artisans were much in evidence in those later gatherings, but it was religion that in most cases had lifted these from obscurity and poverty. The large majority of the early converts were of the common people, members of the constituency deliberately sought by the early preachers.

And the working people were well worth saving. How thoroughly the constituency was captured is revealed by the statement of Dr. Jessop: “In East Anglia the immense majority of Nonconformists are Primitive Methodists.” We must understand East Anglia in this case to mean certain portions of Norfolk and a small portion of Suffolk. That such a statement should be made by a dignitary of the Anglican Church is evidence of the greatness of the victory achieved. Prof. Grieve, in the “Encyclopedia Britannica,’”states that “while the Oxford Movement was awakening one section of the people of England, the Primitive Methodists were making themselves felt among other classes of the population.” The early preachers, seeking those who needed their ministry most, designing “to make determined aggression on the ranks of the enemy, to direct their efforts to the depraved and neglected masses,” were the pioneers of social and moral revolution. Dr. Jessop says: “In the struggle for a better social condition the leaders of the rural population have been Methodists, and throughout that conflict the conduct of the working-man was characterised by an amount of dignified self-reliance, a resolute tenacity of purpose, a willingness to listen to reason, and an absence from violence and ferocity which contrasts most favourably with the attitude and temper of these gatherings during any similar agrarian revolt.” We have brought a higher morality as well as an enlarged spiritual vision to the people. We have inspired them to virtuous living as well as religious passion.

It is necessary to emphasise this. There are those who say that Methodism manifests impatience with the ordinary conventions and little concern for common honesty. This attitude reveals ignorance or prejudice, or both. Those who regard a spirit of independence as evidence of opinionated self-content and look upon heartiness of religious expression as hypocrisy show an inability to understand the historical evolution of our Church. We do not claim to have made perfect men and women, nor to have created a perfect Church organisation. But we do claim to have made the people better than they were. We have restored the order of saints amid the commonplace, and our Church, with all its faults, is the Church of the people. Some soldiers care nothing for the cause, but everything for the fighting; so some, with an exaggerated liking for license, miscalled liberty, have used the outburst of religious enthusiasm as the stalking-horse for personal prejudice. There have been in our churches those whose lives were unlovely, in whom meanness was mirrored in all its shadiness and shallowness, but the Church is not to be judged from these. They would have been unlovely and mean in any case; probably more so without religion. To say that these prove Primitive Methodism to have failed in its mission would be as if Stiggins were regarded as the type of all Nonconformist ministers, and they were condemned outright. Our constituency was not ideal when we came to it; it is not perfect now; but we can be proud of it. And “it doth not yet appear what it shall be.”

References

Primitive Methodist Magazine 1914/190