The Independent Chapel, Broad Street, Crediton.

The original meeting house in Broad Street (now the High Street) was demolished around 1900. Below is an excerpt from the early minutes.

'The word shall count when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there.' Thus opens the Baptismal Register of the Present Body of Congregationalists on the 15th November 1804. Their minute book opens only a little earlier with the words,  'Considering ourselves formed into a Church of Christ'. For some months until the Rev. John Innes was formally inducted they had no resident minister. A Mr Cobbin who was occupying their pulpit in 1810 was sufficiently fluent in French to address a congregation of 5,000 prisoners of war at Princetown, and, it may be supposed was in much request by the French officers on parole in Kirton. The Vicar answering No: 2 of Bishop Carey's queries in 1821 made no separate mention of Independents or Presbyterians, they were just Calvinists as distinct from Unitarians, Anabaptists or Wesleyans. There were he said, too, no 'Papists' in the Parish. Among members buried in the Chapel Graveyard were...John Mann (2), Thomas Heathman, Captain Flood, Master Mariner, and Bradley Amerideth aged 91 and of a family of some importance in earlier times. Other members of the Congregation were Thomas Rudall, Attorney, who died in 1875 aged 95, and his wife who died in 1883, aged 94; but both buried in the family vault in the Churchyard, presumably with the Rev: John, the Naval Chaplain, whose nephew Thomas Rudall was.

This is a page from The Mansfield family history.

 

 

A new book has just been published about the Congregational Church.

The book 'The History of the Congregational Church in Crediton.' is available directly from the author Colin White who can be contacted at  cwhite9384@tesco.net