Circuit Division

John Wesley was very reluctant to decrease the size of the vast circuits of his day. He had agreed to the division of the Bradford-on-Avon Circuit in 1781, but only if there was just one horse kept in each circuit.⁵⁶ The reason for this comment is not clear but may have had to do with not making things too convenient for the preacher, or perhaps avoiding unnecessary expense. He was still of the same opinion in 1790: ‘Most of our circuits are too small rather than too large. I wish we had no circuit with fewer than three preachers in it, or less than 400 miles riding in it in four weeks’.⁵⁷ In a reply to a letter from Thomas Hanson, Wesley wrote that he was ‘never fond of multiplying circuits without an absolute necessity’ and agreed with Hanson that the idea of more (and therefore smaller) circuits ‘is oftener proposed for the ease of the preachers than the profit of the people.’⁵⁸ Having said this, it was not beyond Wesley to offer the opposite opinion. One year later in

54Quotation from Hugh Bourne’s journal in John T. Wilkinson, Hugh Bourn 1772 – 1852 (London: Epworth Press, 1952), 142.

55“Minutes of Conference 1769” in Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, vol.1 (London: John Mason at the Wesleyan Conference Office, 1862).

56 Letter from John Wesley to Samuel Bradburn, dated November 1781, John Telford,

ed., The Letters of John Wesley, vol.7, 1780-1787 (London: Epworth Press, 1931, reprinted 1960), 88.

57 Quotation from a letter from John Wesley to a local preacher in the Sarum Circuit

1790, in Barry Briggs, “Saints of the Soil: Early Methodism in Agricultural Areas” in Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society (hereafter Proc. WHS), vol.48, October 1992, 187.

58 Letter from John Wesley to Thomas Hanson dated London, January 30, 1782 in

Telford, Letters, vol.7, 104.

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1791, he was saying that the Dales Circuit was too large and that ‘four or five others might be taken out of it’.⁵⁹

Circuits nevertheless were divided in Wesley’s lifetime, and at first the process of circuit division seems to have been simple and straightforward. On arriving from the conference of 1776, the itinerant Thomas Taylor found the Keighley circuit to be ‘a large rambling range’

and wrote that: ‘I divided the circuit into two very compact rounds, making Colne and the societies which surrounded it into a circuit by itself; by which means both the circuits are become very agreeable.’⁶⁰ Taylor appears to have taken this action on his own authority and for his own (and possibly colleagues’) benefit. Too much cannot rest on one example, but it could be concluded that before about 1790, when members were untroubled by stirrings of discontent over the ‘power’ of the itinerants, they were content to allow travelling preachers to take such decisions.

Some eighteen years later the situation was very different. The 1793 Leeds Wesleyan conference addressed the matter of dividing circuits and directed that: ‘No division shall be made in a Circuit, where it does not appear to the District Meeting, the Committee of Delegates and the Conference that there is such an enlargement of the work of God as requires it’.⁶¹ Concerns about financial viability lay behind this directive, but it also highlights the strength of control of the conference and the district meeting over the circuits at this time. By 1797 however, after a period of turbulence, the conference recognized the need to make some concessions to local decision-making. Thus, the 1797 Leeds Wesleyan conference special address to the societies included the rule that in future circuits could not be divided without the

59 The Dales Circuit originally included the dales of the northern Pennines and much

of Westmoreland.

60“The Life of Mr. Thomas Taylor”, in Thomas Jackson, ed., The Lives of the Early Methodist Preachers, chiefly written by themselves, vol.5 (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1866), 42- 43.

61The answer to question 23: ‘What directions shall be given concerning the division of Circuits?’ Ms. Journal of the Leeds Conference 1793. MARM 1977/ 585.

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‘abbrobation’ of the quarterly meeting. ⁶² The history of such legislation provides insight into the way in which within the connexional system, the balance of elements of power shifted backwards and forwards.

By 1827, the increasing population density of the towns meant that single-town circuits had to be divided to remain manageable, and it would appear that members were taking advantage of the freedom this offered to choose in which circuit they preferred to attend their class meeting and hold their membership.⁶³ The 1827 Manchester conference perceived the potential for a breakdown of order and discipline, so it was ruled that members were to meet in classes in the circuits in which they resided. One reason given for the rule was that

‘no security can be obtained on the purity and character of non-resident members’.⁶⁴ If a person could not be seen day to day, they could be falling into bad habits without being noticed. This attention to individual purity and character harked back to the earliest days of Methodism.

There also appears to be one rule for the members and another for the itinerants. In their case: ‘Preachers of different circuits in the same town are advised to meet once a month for mutual conference and prayer, brotherly love and friendly consultation on subjects of common concern to their respective circuits’.⁶⁵

The most obvious reason for division was the sheer number of members and/or societies for the travelling preachers effectively to do their job. The superintendent of the Devonport circuit described how, in a circuit of ’46 chapels, preaching houses and societies’ it was proving impossible for the itinerants to visit many of the societies more than once a month, and several of them only once a quarter. ⁶⁶ He partly

62 Se Chapter Four – The Circuit Quarterly Meeting.

63See also Chapter Seven: Local Preachers, the Local Preachers’ Meeting and the Preaching Plan.

64 MS Journal, Wesleyan Methodist Conference 1827, Manchester, 821, MARM 1977/

585.

65 ibid

66 Letter from Corbett Cooke to Jabez Bunting dated Conference, 1840, in Ward,

Early Victorian Methodism, no. 189, 244.

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attributed the way that the Warrenite revolt had been able to take root in the circuit to the low level of pastoral influence.

Division of circuits could create as many problems as they attempted to solve. Greaves examined the further division into four of the Leeds circuits in the 1840’s and noted the problems created by the ‘unwieldy and expansive arrangement’. One issue was the distances created between the main part of the Leeds Fourth circuit and the outlying villages which led to excessive horse hire expenditure. Another was a dispute around the relationship between a proposed dividing boundary and the main road which formed a civic boundary. ⁶⁷ It took until much later in the century for the conference to legislate on the matter of the boundaries of divided circuits:

…The boundaries of circuits which are divided shall in future be fully stated in the Minutes of the Synod to which they belong…and a copy inserted in the Minutes of the Quarterly Meetings of the Circuits concerned…Ordinance or for other maps of the localities concerned shall be coloured to show the boundaries…⁶⁸

Plate 3, a diagram of the boundary of a divided circuit in Preston, may be one such ‘map of the locality’.⁶⁹

Although many Wesleyan circuit divisions were made for straightforward reasons, there were others made for tactical reasons. It would appear that by 1812, some circuits had become worldly-wise in regard to the benefits of being a Connexion. By the tactic of dividing large circuits, they could justify more preachers, whose allowances

67Greaves, “Methodism in Yorkshire”, chapter 9, 250.

68“Standing Orders, 49 – Boundaries of Circuits” in Minutes of Conference 1895 (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Bookroom, 1895), 350.

69 Found in W. Pilkington, The Makers of Wesleyan Methodism in Preston and the relation of Methodism to the Temperance and Teetotal Movements (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1890), 94. Accessed at https://archive.org/bookreader.

Plate 3 Map showing the boundary created when the Preston