Tolpuddle Old Chapel: A Brief Guide

1808 Robert Standfield, father of Thomas and grandfather of John (two of the Martyrs) leased a dwelling house in Tolpuddle, now believed to be ‘Martyrs’ Cottage’, together with a one acre plot. The house was subsequently let to Jeremiah Argyle, a well-known Methodist preacher.

1810 Thomas Loveless – father of George and of James – gained a licence to use his house in Tolpuddle as a Dissenter’s meeting house for Methodist worship. This is evidence that by this time there would have been a substantial body of Methodists in the village.

1818 Robert Standfield sold the lease of a piece of his Tolpuddle plot to 12 Trustees so that they could build a Chapel ‘for the purposes of preaching and expounding God’s Holy Word and the performance of all other acts of religious worship.’ Standfield’s cottage, occupied by Jeremiah Argyle, was on one side of this plot; on the other was the house of one William Brine, the father of James. The agreement of the sale required that the Chapel should be a Wesleyan Chapel, and those who preached there were expected to adhere to Wesleyan doctrine. The Trustees included two of the future Martyrs – George Loveless and Thomas Standfield. It is almost certain that those who commissioned the building, the Trustees, would also have been involved in building it, together with their friends and families.

1818 The Chapel must have been built quickly. There is a registration document dated 8th September 1818 recording its completion, and it opened in the same year as the Trustees’ agreement was signed: 1818. We have no written records of how the building was constructed or financed, but we may conjecture that there were loans – possibly to be repaid by the revenues of the Chapel itself which would almost certainly have been made up of pew fees. The brick base would have come from local brick pits in the valley (a number figure in old maps of the area) perhaps even donated, and the cob was gathered locally as well (quite possibly from the Affpuddle chalk-pit). 1818 was also the year in which the British government, alarmed by the rapid spread of con-conformist places of worship and falling numbers in Church of England congregations, committed £1m for the building of new Anglican churches.

1818 October 13th. The Chapel opened by way of an evening service conducted by Ministers from Weymouth. There was an anti-Methodist riot, culminating in attacks on the visiting ministers and their parties as they left the building. Women were assaulted, and the whole company was pelted with stones. The coaches were pursued two miles or more down the road, where – at Puddletown – the coach driver received a near-mortal wound in his neck. These details were revealed in the Bath Chronicle and the Salisbury Journal, and the reports were also reprinted in the national press. There is good evidence of anti-Methodist persecution in Tolpuddle through the 1820s. George Loveless mentions this in his writings, and it is corroborated by others.

Little is known of the life around the Chapel from the time of its opening to its probable demise sometime in the 1840s – we know it was in use in 1843, and we know it was ultimately replaced by the building of the new Chapel in 1862, and so it is clear that the Methodist community here did not die out in these years. It is possible that the lease – a ‘three life lease’ which obtained for the period determined by three named lives – expired with the death of the last named life. We know that by 1862 the land had reverted to the landowner.

Little is known of the life around the Chapel from the time of its opening to its probable demise sometime in the 1840s – we know it was in use in 1843, and we know it was ultimately replaced by the building of the new Chapel in 1862, and so it is clear that the Methodist community here did not die out in these years. It is possible that the lease – a ‘three life lease’ which obtained for the period determined by three named lives – expired with the death of the last named life. We know that by 1862 the land had reverted to the landowner.