The history of religious dissent in the UK is complex, and many ancestors are lost from official records (especially those in the 17th century) because of their dissenting beliefs, so I thought a simplified summary and definition of terms might help family researchers.
Puritans were members of the Church of England (CofE) who wanted it to be purified, ie. made less Popish, less like the Roman Catholic church. They were, and wanted to remain, members of the established church, so until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the family events of most Puritans would still be recorded in the CofE registers, even if the mode of faith they wanted for the established church was Presbyterian (this already being the form of the established church in Scotland). The main exceptions to this were (a) during the Civil War up to 1652 when many CofE registers were barely kept or lost entirely, and (b) people of any faith who didn’t believe in infant baptism choosing not to baptise their infants at all.
‘Dissenters’ and ‘non-conformists’ were either people who disagreed with the Church of England all along and always wanted to meet separately (eg. the Baptists) or people who didn’t ‘conform’ to the CofE after the Restoration in 1660 (which included a lot of Puritans).
In summary, the main terms used to describe dissenters in England up to the 1750s were: Presbyterians, Independents, Congregationalists, Ana/Baptists and Quakers but there were also less well-known ones like Shakers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists and more. There were also Moravians whose faith started in central Europe, and Huguenots (French Protestants), many of whom fled to England as well as other parts of Europe at various dates, especially in the late 17th century. In addition of course there were Jewish people and Roman Catholics, though Catholics were more commonly called ‘recusants’. Methodism evolved later, initially within the established church, later as an independent movement that also split and regrouped into different types of Methodists. In more recent years, most of the English dissenting faiths, other than Methodism, have joined forces as the United Reformed Church (URC).
After 1660, the Parliaments of Charles II re-enforced the Church of England with an iron hand and introduced a range of harsh, oppressive measures against dissenters of all kinds. This forced the more determined sects to meet separately and in secret while others re-conformed to the Church of England, or appeared to do so by turning up at church. Ministers who wouldn’t swear to use the Book of Common Prayer under the Act of Uniformity were evicted from their parishes – they often became leaders of the separate, secret meetings.
Oppression mostly ended in 1689 after William and Mary had come to the throne and the Act of Toleration arrived. Within certain constraints, this allowed dissenters (not including Roman Catholics) to have their own meeting houses and meetings. Most dissenter records only begin at this time or later, though a few are earlier, usually Quaker and Baptist ones. The records when they exist can be patchy and incomplete. Many dissenters would still have their family events recorded in CofE registers because this gave them a stronger legal status. For quite a while, most dissenters would still be buried in CofE churchyards because it took time to acquire their own burial grounds.
So the faith business was hugely complicated and upheaved in the UK for a long time, especially during the 17th century, making it very hard to track dissenting ancestors in that period. This is why I include dissenters amongst Morganhold’s “lost” ancestors and plan to write more about them in future.
Morganhold 