Baptist church books: Kensworth and St Albans 1675-1810

摘要

The Baptist church founded at Kensworth, Hertfordshire, by 1652 was part of the wave of (overt) foundations taking advantage of the interregnum; like many, it arose from the changed convictions of a clergyman of the establishment. Even then the church was one very much based on the edges of counties (a popular move to fox antagonistic shire-based authorities). As a convenient map shows, the church drew its membership from a wide area of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, and even a corner of Middlesex. Its contacts with the Abingdon Association, based primarily on Berkshire and Oxfordshire, further emphasises its interests beyond the purely local. Such connections always struggled against problems of communication. Thus a separation in 1688 - the Kensworth church (later moving over into Bedfordshire, to Dunstable) taking copies of the records from 1675, and leaving the originals with the newly separated branch at St Albans - was unsurprising. (That the records go back no further is traditionally explained by a deacon having retaliated for his excommunication by refusing to return the earlier ones - allegedly already four volumes, although to fill them they must have been writing in immense detail compared with later practice).