From Magic to Moralism

Abstract

On a wet Sunday morning in May 1807, several thousand people gathered on the top of Mow Cop, an isolated hill on the borders of Cheshire and Staffordshire. They had come for a day of praying, preaching, hymn-singing and testimonies. Such ‘Camp Meetings’ were a well-established feature of religious life on the American frontier, where they would last several days. The Wesleyan Conference decided that meetings of this sort were not desirable in England, where they seemed an obstacle to the church discipline and ministerial control that were increasingly preoccupying the Wesleyan leadership. As a result, the leaders of the Staffordshire revival, a carpenter named Hugh Bourne and a potter, William Clowes, were expelled from the Wesleyan Connexion.They subsequently joined with the ‘Magic Methodists’ of Delamere Forest in Cheshire, one of several groups living at this time on the margins of official Methodism. In 1812 they assumed the title of ‘Primitive Methodists’. At first they grew fast, and by the end of the century they had 200,000 members. They were seen at the time, and historians have since generally agreed they were, as the most thoroughly working class of major religious denominations in nineteenth-century England. Many of the trends in working-class religion during that century are epitomised in their history.