I feel I must ask the indulgence of this meeting for offering any contribution. I am primarily a social and economic historian, dealing with village communities in Cambridgeshire. Until very recently, I have been trying to establish the economic framework within which these communities worked – the way, in fact, they made their bread and butter, or rather, lard. But I am now trying to extend my terms of reference to include that part of the villagers’ lives which revolved round the parish church, or, occasionally, the nonconformist chapel. As a first step I have been trying to discover the exact social status of villagers who were active members of nonconfomist groups in the later seventeenth century.

Early Methodism is often studied as an example of a popular religious movement, but the purpose of this paper is to explore some of the reasons behind its unpopularity, for suffering and persecution characterised its early phases as well as growth and success. The persecution of Methodists took many forms. Perhaps the hardest to bear were those least often recorded, such as the eviction of society members from their homes and jobs, or the unnerving social ostracism which made life intolerable in many villages and families. The persecution usually described in the journals of the methodist pioneers, however, was that inflicted by ‘the mob’. ‘The mob’ was an elastic term in their vocabulary and could range from a knot of village youths throwing stones to the ferocious urban crowds which cruelly assaulted worshippers in Exeter in 1745 and Norwich in 1752. ‘Mobbing’ too covered a gamut of activity. Much of it was rude horseplay, like the release of sparrows at the candles in a cottage meeting; some was petty malicious damage, like the breaking of windows. But not infrequently it erupted more violently. Preaching-houses at St Ives, Sheffield, Arborfield, Wolverhampton, Nantwich and Chester were pulled down, and others severely damaged. A number of houses, generally of poor people, were wrecked or sacked. Many persons, women and children among them, were cruelly beaten and some scarred or injured for life. A few, like William Seward, first blinded and then killed by a mob at Hay in 1741, paid for their beliefs with their lives. The knowledge of these ordeals, transmitted by biographies and oral tradition, gave the movement its equivalent of a martyrology and built up that image of heroic, primitive Methodism which, like the image of primitive Christianity itself, stimulated and reproved the piety of later, more comfortable generations.

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ The carrying out of this injunction has been interpreted differently in different ages. Professor Rupp reminded us in an early book that sixteenth-century Puritans and Protestants were not Victorian Christians in period costume. Calvin and Knox would have been hounded by the Lord’s Day Observance Society if their views on Sunday games had been known to Victorian evangelicals. During the years 1770–1870 there was an increasing strictness and rigidity with regard to ‘the world’. First of all there was the question did the world belong to God or the devil. Most evangelicals in 1770 would have said that it belonged to God, but by Victorian times they were not so certain. Abner Brown, speaking of one parson’s wife, says: ‘When her fine manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “ Satan’s earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ On the other hand Lord Mount Temple when censured by friends for attending the Queen’s fancy-dress ball replied: ‘This is God’s world by right, and not the devil’s. Our business is to subdue it to its lawful king, and not to abandon it to the enemy.’ With regard to pleasures and amusements there was a growing strictness; I was able to give an example of this with regard to the Venn family in John Venn and the Clapham Sect.

The increasing interest in nineteenth-century popular religion must serve as the excuse for this summary of my study of one aspect of two great nineteenth-century religious revivals: the ‘second spring’ of the Church of Rome in the 1840s, and that older evangelical rediscovery of the Gospel which in the same decade bore such abounding fruit in the parochial ministry of the Church of England. I have sought to chronicle the institutional development of both these movements in their impact upon the proletarian Irish migrants into mid-victorian London: the least infidel portion of that huge, half-heedless multitude of the destitute against which the best religious impulses of the period lashed themselves so devotedly, and too often in vain.

In recent years discussion of the relationship between the Churches and society in nineteenth-century England has concentrated on a topic that very much concerned contemporaries: the absence of the working classes from public worship. Much stress has been laid on the parlous position of the Churches in the towns, particularly the large towns where the proportion of the population attending church was lowest and where the working classes, however defined, were most numerous. Because on average church attendance was better in the countryside, and because it is known that the growth of urban population owed more to migration than natural increase before 1851, it has been suggested that the transition made by migrants from a rural to an urban society may explain the difficulties experienced by the urban churches in attracting worshippers. Modern research has shown that church attendance is one of the habits likely to be dropped by migrants; and thus it is suggested that migrants coming from the countryside where church attendance was normal dropped the habit as part of the ‘cultural shock’ of the move to the very different social life of the town.

La question que je voudrais examiner avec vous est la suivante: peut-on, et par quelles méthodes, avec quels documents, mesurer la vitalité religieuse d’un groupe humain, au sein d’un pays catholique, à une époque déterminée?

Depuis longtemps on ne réduit plus l’histoire religieuse à l’histoire des institutions ecclésiales, de leurs structures, de leur personnel et des relations des églises avec les sociétés politiques: mais on s’intéresse au comportement et à la spiritualité du peuple des fidèles ou des moins fidèles, aux croyances, aux dévotions, à la sensibilité religieuse des diverses catégories d’hommes et de femmes, à travers les générations successives. Or la difficulté est grande de rejoindre ceux qui ne se sont pas distingués de la masse par leur héroïsme ou leur sainteté, par leurs écrits ou par leurs œuvres. On a fait des histoires du sentiment religieux en partant des textes des docteurs, des fondateurs de communautés et de mouvements, voire d’écrivains de second ordre: et un Henri Brémond a magistralement démontré tout ce que l’on pouvait tirer même d’auteurs de second ordre, qui ne furent pas forcément les moins influents ou les moins représentatifs. En revanche il paraît malaisé de donner une idée précise de la mentalité, à plus forte raison de la conviction et de la ferveur, d’une société prise dans son ensemble, ou de ‘l’homme de la rue’ qui ne s’est pas exprimé et n’a pas laissé d’archives ou de postérité spirituelle.

In the Lancet for 26 November 1904, there was a brief and caustic account of ‘curious psychological phenomena...in connexion with the religious upheaval in progress’ in Wales, in which ‘the chief instigator of this tumult’ [that is, Evan Roberts] is quoted as saying to a journalist who interviewed him for the Western Mail: ‘When I go out to the garden I see the devil grinning at me but I am not afraid of him. I go into the house, and when I go out again to the back I see Jesus Christ smiling at me.’ The Lancet also cited a description of the young revivalist by the same journalist: ‘His restlessness is marvellous, he is walking about all day with the springiness of a man treading on wires, his arms swaying unceasingly’; and referred to accounts of the revivalist lying on the floor at meetings for long intervals ‘weeping and writhing in agony’. The Lancet commented that if among the friends of the preacher there were any medical practitioners it would be a kindness on their part to point out to him ‘ the peril which menaces his intellectual equilibrium’. This judgement was shrewd for towards the end of 1906 Evan Roberts had broken down, and he never sufficiently recovered from the intense and prolonged nervous excitement of the revival period, but lived in retirement as a near recluse in England from 1906 to 1925, and thereafter in South Wales until his death in 1951. It is a sad story of a young former miner and blacksmith from the background of deep piety in the Welsh calvinist methodist chapel at the village of Loughor in Glamorgan, who was preparing himself for the ministry at a denominational preparatory school prior to theological college training - a man sincere, sensitive and deeply religious, earnestly praying for a revival of religion in Wales - who was caught up by the wave of intense religious emotion which the revival released and who found himself shining before the world in excited newspaper reports throughout Britain and Europe in a blaze of glory, fanned by journalists and religious publicists, as brief as it was excessive.

Race and recreation are two contemporary social problems which historically have had a close connection with religion. Religion has both sanctioned racial discrimination and provided the inspiration to overcome it. It has both opposed and encouraged particular forms of popular recreation. Sociologists and social historians are increasingly investigating the various combinations of these 3 Rs - religion, race, recreation. A great deal of work has been done on the relations between religion and race, quite a lot on race and recreation, especially in the form of sport, and a beginning has been made on religion and recreation. To my knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to bring these three elements together.