Yorkshire Almanac John Wesley speaks at the first love-feast at Birstall

19 July 1761: John Wesley speaks at the first love-feast at Birstall

John Wesley. 1827. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 3. London: J. Kershaw. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

I preached in Birstal room at eight. At one we had thousands, the greatest part of whom were persons “fearing God and working righteousness.” I rode thence to Leeds, in order to preach a funeral sermon for Mary Shent, who, after many severe conflicts, died in great peace. It was one of the largest congregations which has been seen at Leeds, to whom I spoke very plain from part of the Gospel for the day, “Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward.”

I hastened back to the Love-feast at Birstal. It was the first of the kind which had been there. Many were surprised when I told them, “the very design of a Love-feast is a free and familiar conversation, in which every man, yea, and woman, has liberty to speak whatever may be to the glory of God.” Several then did speak, and not in vain: the flame ran from heart to heart, especially while one was declaring with all simplicity the manner wherein God, during the morning sermon, (on those words, “I will, be thou clean,”) had set her soul at full liberty. Two men also spoke to the same effect; and two others who had found peace with God. We then joyfully poured out our souls before God, and praised Him for his marvellous works.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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24 June 1761: A cat joins John Wesley’s street congregation at Robin Hood’s Bay

3 July 1761: John Wesley visits an unjustly bankrupted Yarm liquor smuggler in York Castle

24 July 1761: Jonas Rushford (14) of Bradford tells a perhaps envious John Wesley how the Skipton magician Timothy Crowther helped him find a missing man

24 July 1766: Hats off for Jesus at Pateley Bridge

15 August 1781: The ineffably peripatetic John Wesley discovers a movable pulpit in Sheffield

18 July 1784: Wesley finds children “restrained from open sin” at one of the first Sunday schools, at Bingley

9 May 1757: John Wesley rides into Huddersfield in the Wild West Riding

19 April 1747: The Methodist John Nelson is attacked by an affluent mob while preaching at Heworth Moor and Acomb (York) on Easter Sunday

19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë

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Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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