The first free church was formed in Bristol in 1640 at the home, in Broad Street, of a certain
Dorothy Hazzard. It later moved to the Dolphin Inn in Dolphin Street in 1643. The first Baptist
Church in Bristol met in The Friars in 1650 and removed to Pithay in 1699. The Dorothy Hazzard
nucleus of the first free church in Bristol became a Baptist Church in 1658 and moved into
Broadmead in 1671. The earliest Hanham Baptist history is associated with the ferry near Conham
Hall, and with secret preaching in the woods around Hanham by the persecuted Baptists.
The growth of Bristol's non-conformists between 1640 and 1653 was a direct threat to the
sovereignty of the Church of England. Their rejection of infant baptism and of the state church
caused them to be severely persecuted and when persecution became so severe the nonconformists
were forced to hold secret meetings in Hanham Woods in 1658. A dedication stone previously at
Hanham Mount is the earliest mention of field preachers to what was considered to be the morally
darkened Forest of Kingswood.
The following quote from This Sceptred Isle - 1649 - 1660 [p 239], explains a possible reason why
there were so many colliers in and around Hanham:
Until now something like 8o% of the population had worked in agriculture. The biggest industry
was cloth, but the dark satanic mills were yet to come; the cloth industry was still a cottage
industry. So imagine the consequences of the Civil War. The land had been ravaged and therefore so
had the staple industry but by the Restoration, the second half of the seventeenth century, the new
industry that took root was coal. In the sixteenth century coal was a poor man's fuel but in the first
half of the 1600s there was a thirteenfold perhaps as high as a fifteenfold -increase in coal
production.
Coal was not a cottage industry, it needed organized gangs of fit men to mine it. This is the
beginning of private enterprise industry, industry that produced collective, structured employment.
Even in the wild surroundings where meetings were held, the religious rebels were not free from
molestation, imprisonment, and often death. In 1682 the Rev George Fownes was arrested on 12th
March whilst returning on horseback from Hanham; he was sent to Gloucester Prison., charged with
riot, and kept there until he died on the 29th November 1685. In 1683 a lay preacher named Ford, a
mercer by trade [a dealer in textile fabrics] living in the High Street, together with another preacher
by the name of Mr Knight, a minister from Taunton.. were pursued at Hanham, and driven into the
river near Conham Hall. They attempted to swim to safety across the Avon whilst a trooper watched
unmoved. Both were overcome by the depth of water and Mr Ford was drowned. Mr Knight,
although rescued by a collier never recovered and died shortly after. At one time there was also a
bronze plaque on the buttress of Hanham Mount Beacon depicting these last two incidents. Sadly
this has been removed from the site.
It should be explained that in crossing the river, the men would have been on the Gloucester side
and beyond the jurisdiction of the Somerset police. The persecutions should have ceased upon the
passing of the Act of Toleration in 1689 but in reality they continued by more subtle means.
After 1689 Hanham lost no time and the very next year, purchased a plot of land situated in the
High Street on what is now the A431 main road from Bristol to Bath. On this plot of land, once an
orchard, the Old Baptist Chapel was built. Despite the passing of the 1689 Act of Toleration there
were many difficulties involved in its erection. An extract from Wesley and Kingswood and its Free
Churches by George Evans 1911 says:
These people of God had men watching over them, like so many wolves ready to catch the lambs so
soon as they were brought forth into the world. In that year [1714] they groaned under Parliament.