EACH
Sunday morning in Wethersfield United Reformed Church a small congregation
gathers to hear the speaker of the day, to sing hymns and to pray. They are the last
remnants in the village of the Nonconformist tradition that led some of
their forbears to leave England and its Anglican church to practise their
own way of worship in America in the early 1600s.
Religion
in Wethersfield has been a fervent
and rumbustious story touched at times with scandal and sadness. Here
is a taste of those early years and brief pen-portraits of the early nonconformist
preachers
The first name on record is that of RICHARD ROGERS in 1572.
His son Ezekiel was among
those who migrated to New England in ships like the Mayflower and the
Lion (a model of which is in Braintree museum).
The
Wethersfield the early settlers founded in Connecticut in 1634 is very
different from little Wethersfield in Essex. The Connecticut Wethersfield
is a suburb of a large town, Hartford.
The religious intensity of a man like Rogers is almost unimaginable. As
part of their "street cred" lecturers, who were freelance preachers
paid by well-wishers, not the Church, were expected to turn out learned
tracts commenting on some portion of the Bible. Richard Rogers produced
no less than 103 sermons on the Book of Judges.
THE next lecturer at Wethersfield, in 1618, was STEPHEN MARSHALL,
reckoned to be one of the finest speakers of his time. He once preached
at a service for the House of Commons that lasted no less than seven hours!
But the
formist preachers went in for fire and brimstone sermons
DANIEL ROGERS, son of Richard Rogers, followed Stephen Marshall. He was so fond of describing the terrors of damnation to come that he drove some of his listeners to the verge of insanity. JOHN COLE, was initially vicar of the parish of Wethersfield. He was also a Presbyterian and so was eventually excommunicated from the Anglican Church. He was seized and put in Colchester gaol for eight years. He returned to Wethersfield where he set up a licensed Presbyterian meeting in his house but he died a year later.
ROBERT DOD the next preacher of note suffered badly with his health, once having smallpox and the plague together, but he still lived to 63 and died in 1706. In fact Wethersfield was not a very healthy place the early 1700s. An infectious fever was rife and 40 people died.
