Origins in
Bedford. Dissenter
John Bunyan purchased a barn in 1672 for a meeting place. A
meeting house replaced it in 1707 and this chapel was built in 1850.|left The
Act of Uniformity 1662 required churchmen to use all rites and ceremonies as prescribed in the
Book of Common Prayer. It also required
episcopal ordination of all ministers of the Church of England – a pronouncement most odious to the
Puritans, the faction of the church which had come to dominance during the
English Civil War and the
Interregnum. Consequently, nearly 2,000 clergy were "ejected" from the established church for refusing to comply with the provisions of the act, an event referred to as the
Great Ejection. The strict religious tests embodied in the laws of the
Clarendon Code and other
penal laws excluded a substantial section of English society from public affairs and benefits, including certification of university degrees, for well more than a century and a half. Culturally, in
England and Wales, discrimination against Nonconformists endured even longer.
Presbyterians,
Congregationalists,
Baptists,
Calvinists, other "reformed" groups and less organised sects were identified as Nonconformists at the time of the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Following the act, other groups, including
Methodists,
Unitarians,
Quakers,
Plymouth Brethren, and the
English Moravians were officially labelled as Nonconformists as they became organised. The term "
dissenter" came into particular use after the
Act of Toleration 1689, which exempted those Nonconformists who had taken oaths of allegiance from being penalised for certain acts, such as for non-attendance at Church of England services. A
census of religion in 1851 revealed Nonconformists made up about half the number of people who attended
church services on Sundays. In the larger manufacturing areas, Nonconformists clearly outnumbered members of the Church of England.
Trends within Nonconformism Nonconformists in the 18th and 19th century claimed a devotion to hard work, temperance, frugality, and upward mobility, with which historians today largely agree. A major
Unitarian magazine, the
Christian Monthly Repository asserted in 1827:
Women The emerging middle-class norm was for women to be excluded from the public sphere – the domain of politics, paid work, commerce and public speaking. Instead, it was considered that women should dominate in the realm of domestic life, focused on care of the family, the husband, the children, the household, religion, and moral behaviour. Religiosity was in the female sphere, and the Nonconformist churches offered new roles that women eagerly entered. They taught
Sunday school, visited the poor and sick, distributed tracts, engaged in fundraising, supported missionaries, led Methodist
class meetings, prayed with other women, and a few were allowed to preach to mixed audiences.
Politics Disabilities removed Parliament had imposed a series of disabilities on Nonconformists that prevented them from holding most public offices, that required them to pay local taxes to the Anglican church, be married by Anglican ministers, and be denied attendance at Oxford or degrees at Cambridge. Dissenters demanded removal of political and civil disabilities that applied to them (especially those in the Test and Corporation Acts). The Anglican establishment strongly resisted until 1828. The
Test Act 1673 made it illegal for anyone not receiving
communion in the Church of England to hold office under the crown. The
Corporation Act 1661 did likewise for offices in
municipal government. Although the Test and Corporation Acts remained on the statute-book, in practice they were not enforced against Protestant nonconformists due to the passage of various
Indemnity Acts, in particular the
Indemnity Act 1727, which relieved Nonconformists from the requirements in the Test Act 1673 and the Corporation Act 1661 that public office holders must have taken the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper in an
Anglican church. In 1780, Dissenters in Ireland, who in large numbers had organised in the armed
Volunteer movement, were accorded similar relief from the
tests of Anglican conformity which had been imposed under the Irish
Popery Act of 1704. In 1732, Nonconformists in the
City of London created an association, the
Dissenting Deputies to secure final repeal of the Test and Corporation acts. The Deputies became a sophisticated pressure group, and worked with liberal
Whigs to achieve repeal in 1828. It was a major achievement for an outside group, but the Dissenters were not finished. Next on the agenda was the matter of
church rates, which were local taxes at the parish level for the support of the parish church building in England and Wales. Only buildings of the established church received the tax money. Civil disobedience was attempted but was met with seizure of personal property and even imprisonment. The compulsory factor was finally abolished in 1868 by
William Ewart Gladstone, and payment was made voluntary. While Gladstone was a moralistic evangelical inside the Church of England, he had strong support in the Nonconformist community. The marriage question was settled by
Marriage Act 1836 which allowed local government registrars to handle marriages. Nonconformist ministers in their own chapels were allowed to marry couples if a registrar was present. Also in 1836,
civil registration of births, deaths and marriages was taken from the hands of local parish officials and given to local government registrars. Burial of the dead was a more troubling problem, for urban chapels rarely had graveyards, and sought to use the traditional graveyards controlled by the established church. The
Burial Laws Amendment Act 1880 finally allowed this.
Oxford University required students seeking admission to submit to the
Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.
Cambridge University required that for a diploma. The two ancient universities opposed giving a charter to the new
London University in the 1830s, because it had no such restriction. London University, nevertheless, was established in 1836, and by the 1850s Oxford dropped its restrictions. In 1871 Gladstone sponsored legislation that provided full access to degrees and fellowships. The
Scottish universities never had restrictions. The "Nonconformist conscience" of the Old group emphasised
religious freedom and equality, pursuit of justice, and opposition to discrimination, compulsion, and coercion. The New Dissenters (and also the Anglican evangelicals) stressed personal morality issues, including sexuality, family values, and
temperance. Both factions were politically active, but until mid-19th century the Old group supported mostly
Whigs and
Liberals in politics, while the New, like most Anglicans, generally supported
Conservatives. By the late 19th century, the New Dissenters had mostly switched to the Liberal Party. The result was a merging of the two groups, strengthening their great weight as a political pressure group. They were very well organised and highly motivated and largely won over the Whigs and Liberals to their cause. Gladstone brought the majority of Dissenters around to support for
Home Rule for Ireland, putting the dissenting Protestants in league with the
Irish Catholics in an otherwise unlikely alliance. The Nonconformist conscience was also repeatedly called upon by Gladstone for support for his moralistic foreign policy. Many of the first MPs elected for the
Labour Party in the 1900s were also nonconformists. Nonconformists were angered by the
Education Act 1902, which provided for the support of
denominational schools from taxes. The elected local
school boards that they largely controlled were abolished and replaced by county-level
local education authorities that were usually controlled by Anglicans. Worst of all, the hated Anglican schools would now receive funding from local taxes that everyone had to pay. One tactic was to refuse to pay local taxes.
John Clifford formed the
National Passive Resistance Committee. By 1904 over 37,000 summonses for unpaid school taxes were issued, with thousands having their property seized and 80 protesters going to prison. It operated for another decade but had no impact on the school system. The education issue played a major role in the Liberal victory in the
1906 general election, as Dissenter Conservatives punished their old party and voted Liberal. After 1906, a Liberal attempt to modify the law was blocked by the
Conservative-dominated
House of Lords;
after 1911 when the Lords had been stripped of its veto over legislation, the issue was no longer of high enough priority to produce Liberal action. By 1914 the linkage between the Nonconformists and Liberal Party was weakening, as
secularisation reduced the strength of Dissent in English political life.
Today Today, Protestant churches independent of the Anglican
Church of England or the Presbyterian
Church of Scotland are often called "
free churches", meaning they are
free from state control. This term is used interchangeably with "Nonconformist". The steady pace of secularisation picked up faster and faster during the 20th century, until only pockets of nonconformist religiosity remained in England. ==Wales==