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5 unusual facts about English Dissenters


Baptist Chapel, Great Warford

In 1712 a group of dissenters, who had been meeting in local farmhouses, acquired this building.

English Dissenters

The Family of Love, or the Familists, were a religious sect that began in continental Europe in the 16th century.

Archbishop Matthew Parker of that time used it and "precisian" with the sense of stickler.

They were organized around John Pordage (1607–1681), an Anglican priest from Bradfield, Berkshire, who had been ejected from his parish in 1655 because of differing views, but then reinstated in 1660 during the English Restoration.

West Street Baptist Church, East Grinstead

The north of Sussex developed a strong tradition of Nonconformism and Protestant dissent in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.


Geneva Bible

It was one of the Bibles taken to America on the Mayflower, it was used by many English Dissenters, and it was still respected by Oliver Cromwell's soldiers at the time of the English Civil War in the booklet Cromwell's Soldiers' Pocket Bible.

Northumberland, Pennsylvania

Northumberland was the American home of eighteenth-century British theologian, Dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) from 1794 until his death in 1804.


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