Measurement of circuit size

One measure of the size of a circuit was the number of societies it comprised. ‘We broke up much fresh ground, took in many new places, and many souls were converted to God.’ ⁴² At the 1834 local preachers’ meeting of the Bourn Wesleyan circuit, three villages, Falkingham, Dowsby and Cawthorpe, were described as being ‘taken onto the Plan’. That meant that societies (however fragile) had been established in those villages and these would now feature on the preaching plan: the rota for preaching in the circuit. In other words,

40 Letter from William Myles to Jabez Bunting; Hull, 5 June, 1819 quoted in Davies,

George and Rupp, History, vol.4, 358.

41 Quotation from Frederick J. Jobson, A Plea for the Support and Spread of

Methodism in the Villages, 1873, 4-8, in Davies, George and Rupp, History, vol.4, 544.

42 William Hunter, Scarborough Circuit, report in Arminian Magazine 1779, 593.

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they had become part of the circuit.⁴³ This particular circuit therefore became larger by three additional societies to manage and provide for, and a number of miles longer.

In the earliest days, societies were coming and going from a circuit as some causes thrived and became established and others were too weak to survive. The itinerant James Rogers described how, in his youth, he and a few friends asked about ‘getting the preaching’ in their own village. The preachers were willing ‘to make a trial’, this was successful and so ‘they soon joined about fifteen of us in a class, and afterwards took us into their Plan’. ⁴⁴ Unfortunately, some then lost enthusiasm and drifted away, the leader and his wife died, followed by the man who provided hospitality for the preachers, and the cause failed. This account is a good illustration of one way in which the early circuits developed, grew or shrank, and also of the fragility of the situation and the dependence on local leadership and support.

A review written in 1878 about Tindall’s Wesleyan Atlas, observing the varying density of coloured dots, noted that while ‘in North Durham and the region around Newcastle upon Tyne …chapels of that [Wesleyan Methodist] denomination are numerous and clustered very near one another’ ‘…the map of Hants is dreary indeed’. ⁴⁵ The reviewer seems alarmed at the thought that ‘in England alone’, 8,631 places still had no Wesleyan chapel; and that roughly half of these were places with fewer than 250 inhabitants. The reviewer may have intended his remark to draw attention to Wesleyan Methodism being less strong in rural areas.

However, the question of whether a circuit could or should sustain a society in every village of less than 250 inhabitants, especially at a time

43 Bourn Wesleyan Local Preachers Meeting Minutes 1838 onwards, LINC

Meth/B/Bourne.

44‘The Life of Mr. James Rogers’ in Thomas Jackson, ed., The Lives of the Early Methodist Preachers chiefly written by themselves, 3^rd edn., vol.4 (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1866), 281-282.

45 Review (author unknown), London Quarterly Review, October 1877-January 1878,

vol.19, 152-3 and 157-8, quoted in Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes 1850-1900 (Leicester, Edgar Backus, 1954), 97.

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of rapid movement to the towns, does not seem to have occurred to him.⁴⁶

Another way of describing the size of a circuit was to state the number of members. Unlike the Church of England whose parish size could be stated in terms of general population, Methodist circuits were described in terms of the number of members in each society added together.

The list of ‘Numbers of members in our Societies’ in the Conference Minutes (first produced in 1767) was shown by circuit and this gives a clue to the size of each. ⁴⁷ In 1820 for example, numbers ranged from such as Kettering 230, Maidstone 315 and Swindon 111, to such as Louth 1500, Hull 2150 and Manchester 3025.⁴⁸ These circuit membership figures could have several interpretations. A lower number could indicate a newly established or newly divided circuit.⁴⁹ The Isle of Wight circuit first appears on the list of 1788 with 87 members.⁵⁰ A lower number could also indicate an exodus due to emigration (both abroad and to the towns),⁵¹ the effects of a local dispute or a reforming movement,⁵² the closure of a main provider of employment or the strength of other traditions in the area. Conversely, a higher number could indicate a well established circuit going back to Wesley’s early itinerancy,⁵³ a ‘revival’, a particular enthusiasm for Methodism in the area, an exodus from another tradition, or a heavily populated area. Epidemics also played a part. ‘There has been a great

46 Haigh had a similar concern and included in his Synopsis a list of 366 ‘Places

unoccupied as yet, by the Wesleyan Methodists’. Some of the places had (in 1821) populations as low as 56 (Youlton). Haigh, Synopsis.

47“Minutes of Conference 1767” in Henry Rack, ed., The Works of John Wesley, vol.10 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2011), 346, 347.

48Ms. Journal of the Liverpool Conference 1820, Question11, MARM 1977/ 585.

49 See later for circuit division.

50“Minutes of Conference 1788” in Rack, Works, vol.10, 657.

51‘I fear the prodigious amount of emigration to America, etc. will keep our aggregate numbers low.’ Letter from Jabez Bunting to Edmund Grindrod, Liverpool, May 1 1832, in W.R. Ward, ed., Early Victorian Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting 1830 - 1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 124.

52 In 1797, 320 of the 600 members of the town society of the Nottingham Wesleyan

circuit left to join the Methodist New Connexion - ‘the Kilhamites’. In this case, also seizing a chapel and preachers’ houses. G.H.H., [initials only] compiler, The History of Wesleyan Methodism in Nottingham and its Vicinity (Nottingham: W.Bunny, Bridgesmith Gate, 1859), 55.

53 For example, London, Bristol and Newcastle.

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turning to religion in those parts [Birmingham] since the cholera began its ravages’.⁵⁴

Numbers of members were monitored closely by the conference. In the 1769 list of circuits in the Minutes, some (Norfolk, Sheffield and Lancashire South) were marked as having ‘fewer members than there were a year ago.’⁵⁵ This looks like an early example of ‘name and shame’.