Bampton Baptists

Bampton Baptists – Particular Baptists were meeting as early as 1672, but the congregation was not officially organized until September 1690, with 39 members of the church at Tiverton, most of whom were living in Bampton, to which was added 75 names shortly thereafter.   They first met in the house of Richard Hooper, who gained a license to preach from the Bishop of Exeter on 25 May 1672.  Other licenses were issued that year for the house of Thomas Bryan and John Ball.  The first permanent meeting house was the large hall attached to Arthurshayne farmhouse in Frog Lane.  Not far, on Luke Street, the Baptists had a burying ground, complete with a crypt.  Between the burying ground and Arthurshayne runs the Shuttern Brook, and there they baptized by immersion a place surrounded by a stone wall that came to be known as The Baptistery.  By the 1720s Arthurshayne was no longer meeting the needs of the congregation, and in 1725 they built a chapel on the grounds of the cemetery.  The chapel remained in use until destroyed by a fire, after which a new chapel was rebuilt in 1860.  That chapel remained in use until 1967, when the church closed and the building was sold and converted into two homes in 1969 (29-30). The Baptists, as nonconformists, were long under suspicion as being political nonconformists as well, and as such, their ministers were often persecuted during the period between the Restoration of Charles II and the Glorious Revolution of William of Orange.  The building at Arthurshayne was considered a “safe house” for its minister in that it had a trap door under the stairs leading to a cellar and a secret passageway out.  Only a few knew the secret of how to open the door, which was otherwise inaccessible.  For many years the congregation was mixed, containing both immersionists and paedobaptists.  Though beginning with 114 members in 1690, the church had dwindled to just 26 in 1830, the result of a number of factors—”bad ministry, internal squabbles, and the strife between the Anabaptists and the Paedobaptists who were such arch enemies.  Efforts were sometimes made to allow both sides into the same service which caused yet more trouble.  In 1777 a row broke out over some Paedobaptist Presbyterians who wished to share a service.  The row eventually led to the minister resigning his seat a Bampton, and he moved to Honiton.    Francis quotes an unnamed source [church book?] as saying that for between 1775-1825 “there was also very little else than broils and quarrels, wrath and contentions amongst the members” (p. 30).   Pastors after 1800: Mr. Davies (1803-12), William Dore 1812—stayed for 18 months, Mr. Downes—stayed for 2 years, ?-1830—supplied and then pastored by Thomas Thomas (1830-44); C. E. Pratt (1845-47), and William Walton (1847-57).  See T. J. Francis, The Religious History of the Parish of Bampton, Devon (Tiverton:  Fort Press, 2001).