The Wapping Baptists: Murky Origins and the Silence of John Spilsbery

ABSTRACT

The Wapping Baptist church has often been referred to as the oldest Baptist church in London. Historians have confidently placed its origins as early as 1633 when a small group of those adopting believer’s baptism departed from the semi-separatist Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church, then soon to be pastored by the influential John Spilsbery. However, there is no primary source evidence connecting those of this early exodus to the later Wapping Baptists, and similarly, there is no evidence to suggest that Spilsbery was ever at Wapping (the first suggestion not appearing until 1808). This article will not, unfortunately, clarify the Wapping church origins – they remain murky and obscure – however, it will raise doubt surrounding the traditional narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Wapping Baptists
• John Spilsbery
• John Norcott
• Hercules Collins
• Baptist origins
• seventeenth century

The Wapping Baptist church has long had an important reputation among Calvinistic Baptists. The church survived the persecution of the Restoration and later endured into eras of greater or lesser size and health, moving about London, and finally settling in 1914 in Walthamstow where it still exists today, reconstituted as Grace Church pastored by the Nigerian immigrant Wale Akinrogunde. In 1933, its pastor, Ernest Kevan, wrote what he believed to be a tricentennial retrospective of ‘London’s Oldest Baptist Church’.¹ The traditionally-held founding pastor, John Spilsbery, is a figure of considerable significance within Baptist history.² While others had departed the semi-separatist Jessey-Lathrop-Jessey church of Southwark in the early 1630s prior to Spilsbery’s own exodus over questions of ecclesiology and baptism, the sparse primary documents suggest that Spilsbery pastored the first congregation who had adopted the baptism of professing adults. Murray Tolmie has, thus, described him as ‘the pioneer … of believer’s baptism among the London separatists’.³ Spilsbery wrote sophisticated defences of believer’s baptism, even garnering responses from New England Congregationalists, and some have suggested that he played a key part in the preparation of the first London Baptist Confession of 1644.⁴ Greaves and Zaller go even further, arguing that Spilsbery was not only a signatory, but ‘probably the principal author of the Particular Baptist confession’.⁵ Spilsbery carried his reputation as a Baptist doyen throughout the Civil Wars and Interregnum, rivalled by way of influence perhaps only by William Kiffen.

His supposed successors at Wapping – John Norcott and Hercules Collins – likewise both published substantial defences of believer’s baptism. Both William Kiffen and Charles Spurgeon republished Norcott’s 1672 defence of believer’s baptism, Baptism Discovered Plainly and Faithfully, According to the Word of God in 1694 and 1878, respectively (with seven additional reprints in between, including a 1694 edition translated into Welsh funded by a 20-shilling collection taken by the Wapping church) (Figure 1).^6,

Figure 1. Welsh translation of Norcott’s ‘Baptism Discovered Plainly and Faithfully’ (1694). Note. John Norcott, Bedydd Gwedi i Amlygu yn Eglir ag yn Fyddlon, Yn ol Gair Duw (London: William Marshall, 1694).

Collins, a signatory of the second London Baptist Confession of 1677/89, was even more prolific in his output of published theology, outpaced among seventeenth-century Calvinistic Baptists by only Benjamin Keach and John Bunyan. The importance of the Wapping church – and the theological contribution of its pastors – is significant to Baptists of every subsequent era. But the window into the history of this church only opens on 23 March 1677 when the church minute book marks the installation of Collins as its pastor. While denominational and academic historians have confidently explained the church’s origins over the past two centuries, actual primary sources reveal little of an obscure past.

Spilsbery and Church Origins

In 1633, eighteen members of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church left the fellowship in order to achieve a stricter separatism from the parish structure.⁷ According to the so-called Kiffen Manuscript, several of these separatists then sought a ‘further Baptism’ associated with John Spilsbery in 1638.⁸ Stephen Wright has shown that while there remains controversy in identifying the precise timing of these events – indeed, one Baptist historian compares understanding Particular Baptist origins with ‘trying to untangle a snarled fishing line in the dark’ – nevertheless, Spilsbery was clearly pastoring a small group of people who had adopted believer’s baptism by 1638 but possibly as early as 1633.⁹ The early date became the impetus for Kevan’s 1933 supposed tricentennial and the grounding for his claims that his contemporary inheritors of the Wapping church were ‘London’s Oldest Baptist Church’.¹⁰

However, there are two problems with the traditional narrative. First, Thomas Goodwin wrote to Henry Cromwell in 1656 explaining that Spilsbery would not go to Ireland because the Baptist pastor had accepted a call from ‘a very great people’.¹¹ If the ‘great people’ were the Wapping Baptists, as A. C. Underwood posited, then the congregation whom John Spilsbery earlier pastored in the 1630s was an altogether different church, i.e. not the people who first left from the JLJ church, thus damaging Kevan’s claim of Wapping’s primogeniture.¹² Alternatively, Spilsbery could have departed from Wapping to the ‘great people’ of another church. In 1641, Spilsbery was arrested with twenty-eight others in Ratcliffe for ‘holding an unlawful assembly and conventicle for the exercise of religion in contempt of the law’.¹³ Ratcliffe is the area just north of Wapping, so it is possible that Spilsbery’s former church continued on as the church to be later pastored by Hercules Collins, but the majority of these people lived within the city walls or in the northern suburbs.¹⁴ Additionally, only one person, Katherine Tredwell, of the original JLJ departures can be linked to later Spilsbery episodes.¹⁵ So while Spilsbery might have been connected to the Wapping Baptists in the 1630–40s, no conclusive evidence thus far proves his pastorate.

Second, in the 1650s, John Spilsbery is known to have pastored two other known churches – neither of them Wapping. Through a detailed synthesis of primary documents, Larry Kreitzer argues that in the early 1650s, Spilsbery and Kiffen merged their congregations for weekly gatherings meeting at the Glass House Hall in Broad Street (later known as Pinner’s Hall). While this co-pastoring arrangement was short-lived (perhaps 1650–1653), the location of their meetings was in the parish of St. Peter-le-Poor, some two miles north and west of Wapping.¹⁶ Similarly, in his 1976 exploration of the Watford Baptist church book, B. R. White describes a 1719 entry recalling the Watford church’s origins in the 1650–60s:

When we first had meeting in this town about 50 or 60 years ago we were not then in a church state but were a branch of a church in London meeting at a place called Coal harbour, Mr. John Spilsbury being pastor.¹⁷

White further notes the 1657 Abingdon Association minutes which address ‘the messengers at London meeting weekly at brother Spilsberie’s house in Cole-Harbour in Thames Street’.¹⁸ Cole-Harbour (or Coal Harbour, or Coldharbour) was a narrow street coming up from the Thames, west of London Bridge within the city walls and some two miles west of Wapping. Kreitzer suggests that Coal-Harbour were the ‘great people’ for whom Spilsbery rebuffed Cromwell in 1656 – the call perhaps being the occasion for the amicable split with Kiffen at Glass House Hall (Figure 2).¹⁹

Figure 2. ‘Cole Harbour’ (1682). Note. Layers of London, “William Morgan’s Map of the City of London, Westminster and Southwark (1682),” https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/overlays/william-morgan-s-map-of-the-city-of-london-westminster-and-southwark-1682 (accessed January 2, 2023).

For two centuries, both denominational and academic historians have regularly named Spilsbery as the founding pastor of the Wapping Baptists, often locating him in the neighbourhood itself.²⁰ As suggested above, it is possible that the people with whom he was arrested in Ratcliffe in 1641 later moved south into Wapping, but both primary documents and the earliest secondary histories make no explicit connection between Spilsbery and Wapping. So if there is no connection in the 1630–50s, when was Spilsbery first linked to the maritime suburb?

In 1738, Thomas Crosby, who could be considered the first Baptist denominational historian, made several references to John Spilsbery as well as several more to Hercules Collins, but notably, Crosby never located Spilsbery at Wapping.²¹ Significantly, the first connection to Wapping was made by the Presbyterian Walter Wilson in 1808:

After [Kiffen] had been connected a few years with [the JLJ church], he embraced the principles of the Baptists, and in 1638, was dismissed with several other members, to the Baptist congregation in Wapping, under the care of Mr. John Spilsbury.²²

Wilson’s sprawling four-volume history (over 2200 pages) recounts the origins and peculiarities of many Presbyterian, Congregationalist, General Baptist, Particular Baptist, Quaker, and Unitarian congregations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While Wilson knew of Wapping’s late-seventeenth century significance under Hercules Collins, is it possible – though unlikely – that he accidentally conflated Spilsbery’s mid-seventeenth-century connection to the similarly-named Watford Baptists, mistakenly placing him with the wrong Baptists 150 years later?

Three years after Wilson’s first volume, the Particular Baptist minister Joseph Ivimey published the first of his four-volume history of his denomination. Ivimey, who was aware of Wilson’s volume – quoting and referencing him several times – then followed suit by describing ‘Mr. Spilsbury’s church, which was founded at Wapping’.²³ His third volume of 1823 then devoted an entire article to the church at ‘Old-Gravel Lane, Wapping’ in which he wrote, ‘The minister whom they chose as their pastor, in 1633, was Mr. John Spilsbury’.²⁴ Likely following Wilson’s mistake, Ivimey’s placement of Spilsbery as the first in the line of impressive pastoral succession of Norcott and Collins then cemented these three pastors together for many future historians. So, if it is unlikely that John Spilsbery was the first pastor the Wapping Baptists, and its founding was almost certainly not in the 1630s, what can be known about the church or its pastors prior to the first page of the church minute book in 1677?

The Pre-History of Norcott and Collins

Unfortunately, the minute book contains no anecdotes of the church’s past – no recollection of the church life under the pastoral care of John Norcott and no explanation of the church’s courtship of Hercules Collins. But unlike, Spilsbery, there are two primary source connections between Norcott and the Wapping Baptists of Old Gravel Lane. The first is a 1670 conviction record which records Norcott’s arrest for violation of the 1665 Oxford Act, otherwise known as the Five-Mile-Act (Figure 3). This statute of the so-called Clarendon Code, when enforced, barred ejected clergy from living within five miles of their former parish.²⁵ Geoffrey Nuttall observed that while Edmund Calamy did not include Norcott’s name in his volumes of 1662 ejected ministers, Norcott is listed in William Urwick’s Nonconformity in Herts (1884).²⁶ More specifically, Urwick connected Norcott to the parish of Stanstead St. Margaret’s, some twenty-one miles from Wapping. Incidentally, Hercules Collins would be arrested in 1684 for violation of a modified version of the same act – an ordeal elsewhere described in the church minute book.²⁷

Figure 3. ‘John Norcott in old Gravell Lane, An Anabaptist … Convicted twice and warrants made, His word is taken for a few dayes to consider of submitting to the Oxford Act & to take the oaths of Allegiance & supre: or goe to newgate’. Note. The National Archives, State Papers Online, Reference Number: SP 29/277 f.3, “1 July 1670.”

Norcott’s death on 23 March 1676 – one year and a day before the installation of Collins – reveals the other primary source which places Norcott at Wapping. Benjamin Keach, the Baptist pastor of the Horsleydown church in Southwark, delivered Norcott’s funeral elegy. In a later published version of this elegy, Keach addressed his readers:

To all Sincere Christians that were the Hearers of this Sermon, but more especially to that poor, afflicted, and sorrowful Congregation, which is in God the Father, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, meeting in Old Gravel-Lane, near Wapping, London.²⁸

Keach mourned for the congregation of their ‘real and cordial love for him that is now taken from you’, and empathetically conveyed, ‘I cannot blame you for your mourning, he was a most sweet and choice Preacher, most excellent skill had he to dive into Gospel-Mysteries’.²⁹ Keach praised Norcott’s preaching and pastoral abilities, demurring that he was unworthy to deliver Norcott’s elegy, ‘especially in the Presence of so many able and worthy Ministers’ who had evidently gathered for the funeral.³⁰ The poetic tribute attached to Keach’s actual sermon suggests Norcott led the Wapping church through a period of conversion and numerical growth:

This godly Preacher in a little space,

Much work did do, he swiftly run his race;

With’s might perform’d what e’r he found to do.

God graciously did bless his work also,

Yea few (I think) have had the like success,

In turning sinners unto righteousness.³¹

And while Keach continued to commend Norcott’s preaching ability, he also suggested that Norcott’s labour in the pulpit actually hastened his death:

A Sweet and godly Preacher doth lie here,

Who did his Master Jesus love so dear,

And sinners Souls, that he his strength did spend.

And did thereby (‘tis thought) hasten his end,

He brought himself by preaching to the Grave,

The precious souls of sinners for to save.³²

While nothing else is known about Norcott’s life during his pastorate in Wapping, the title page of Kiffen’s 1694 reprint of Norcott’s Baptism Discovered Plainly and Faithfully says that the 1672 first edition – not extant – was printed in Rotterdam.³³ Almost two hundred years later, Spurgeon intimated that the book was written in the Netherlands while Norcott was in exile, but there is no further evidence to substantiate this claim.³⁴ Geoffrey Nuttall suggests that Norcott was ejected in 1662 from a parish church in Hertfordshire where he had been serving since 1657.³⁵ The timing of Norcott coming to baptistic convictions remains unknown, but if the Hertfordshire Norcott is the same man who would later pastor in Wapping, then he could have served in East London for over a decade before his death in 1676 (but no earlier than 1662). While no marriage records exist for Norcott, the church book includes a 1702 entry of a collection taken by the congregation for a ‘sister Norcott … who is in great distress’.³⁶ This entry is twenty-six years after Norcott’s death, but this ‘sister Norcott’ could quite possibly be John Norcott’s widow or unmarried daughter.

Likewise, for Norcott’s successor, little biographical information exists for Hercules Collins before his arrival at Wapping. According to his tombstone in Bunhill Fields, Collins was born in either 1646 or 1647.³⁷ He appears to have married a Sara Peirson in Croxton of Cambridgeshire in 1669, but primary records reveal nothing more of his family, background, or religious upbringing.³⁸ Stephen Weaver notes that a ‘Hercules Collins’ was arrested in 1670 with thirteen others for attending an illegal conventicle, but there is no indication that he was formally, or informally, pastoring this group.³⁹ It is unlikely that the ‘Mr Collins’ identified in the 1669 Return of Nonconformist Conventicles of Bell Lane in Spitalfields is Hercules Collins.⁴⁰ Similarly unlikely is Weaver’s suggestion that Collins came to the Wapping church from the Petty France Baptist church in Spitalfields.⁴¹ Weaver argues that because the Petty France church book describes Collins in 1680 as ‘our Bro: Collins’, he must have formerly been a member. But ‘brother’ was not exclusively used for covenant membership. Baptist church books routinely refer to other pastors as ‘brother’, like the occasion when the Wapping church book records a request for mediation in 1677 from ‘Bro. Kiffin Bro Dyke Bro. Willcox, Bro Knowels, Bro. Forty, Bro Gosnell and Bro: Jennings’; or when the Petty France book, itself, referred to ‘our dearly beloved Brother Mr Mark Key of Devonshire Square’ or the ‘church of Christ over which our well beloved Brother Mr Sayer Rudd is overseer’.⁴²

While later church book anecdotes, primary documents, and his own published works give much more colour to Collins’ later life, like Norcott, historians have not been able to unearth Collins’ origins. The church book delivers small morsels of the background of Collins’ successor, Edward Elliot, and his own transition to Wapping from Bridgwater, but while, unfortunately, this article cannot clarify the church’s origin story, it does show the traditional narrative to be unproven. Was the Norcott/Collins church a continuation of the 1633 JLJ church who had previously been pastored in Ratcliffe by John Spilsbery? Or were the Wapping Baptists the offspring of a completely different line of descent? Unless future researchers discover previously unknown primary documents, the founding and early years of the Wapping church will remain in a glass seen dimly.

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Nathan Sherman

Nathan Sherman is third-year doctoral candidate at the University of Leicester as a part-time, international researcher. He currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he is the pastor of, Christ Church, a Baptist church plant. His research focuses on the congregational minute book of the Wapping Baptist church (1677–1711) as both a valuable window into the social and cultural realities of this east London people but also as a significant literary artifact in and of itself.

Notes

1 Ernest Kevan, London’s Oldest Baptist Church: Wapping 1633—Walthamstow 1933 (London: Kingsgate Press, 1933). It is unclear if by his title, Kevan meant London’s Oldest [Particular] Baptist Church, or – more likely – London’s Oldest [Surviving] Baptist Church, but in either case, he did not acknowledge the existence of the earlier General Baptist church of the 1620s pastored by Thomas Helwys and John Murton at Bell Alley, Spitalfields.

2 While the spelling of Spilsbery’s surname appears in many different forms across both primary and secondary sources – including Spilsbery, Spilsbury, Spilsberie, Spilsbey, Spilbury, and Spillberry – I will follow Larry Kreitzer in using Spilsbery, as this is how Spilsbery himself signed his name in the two surviving documents bearing his signature. Larry J. Kreitzer, William Kiffen and His World, Part 3, (Oxford: Regents Park College, 2018), 195.

3 Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 24.

4 John Spilsbery, A Treatise Concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme (London, 1643); John Spilsbery, God’s Ordinance, the Saints Privilege: Discovered and Proved in Two Treatises (London, 1646); William Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1969), 145.

5 Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller, “Spilsbury (or Spilsbery), John (1593-c. 1668),” in Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, Vol 2 (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983), 194.

6 Nuttall, “Another Baptist Ejection (1662): The Case of John Norcott,” in Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B. R. White, eds. William H. Brackney, John H. Y. Briggs, and Paul S. Fiddes (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1999), 185. The church book notes that ‘it was agreed that the Church would raise twenty shillings for printing B^ro Norcotts booke of baptism into Welch to be collected next Lords day’, Wapping Church Book, 1677–1711, ‘21 Aug 1694’, 64.

7 Benjamin Stinton, A Repository of Divers Historical Matters relating to English Antipedobaptists (1712), 6–7. The Jacob-Lathrop (or Lathorp)-Jessey church of Southwark (or heretofore, ‘JLJ’ church) is named after its first three semi-Separatist pastors: Henry Jacob, John Lathrop, and Henry Jessey.

8 Stinton, A Repository, 7; John Taylor, A Swarme of Sectaries (London, 1641), 8.

9 Wm. Loyd Allen, “Baptist Baptism and the Turn toward Believer’s Baptism by Immersion: 1642,” in Turning Points in Baptist History: A Festschrift in Honor of Harry Leon McBeth, eds. Michael E. Williams, Sr., and Walter B. Shurden (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2008), 37. Following B. R. White, Stephen Wright has effectively shown that while Spilsbery had adopted an early form of separatist baptism by affusion in 1630s, he – and his followers – did not adopt fully adopt believer’s baptism by immersion until 1638. B. R. White, “Baptist Beginnings and the Kiffin MSS” Baptist History & Heritage (1967): 27–37; Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–49 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006), 77–8, 92, 106–9. For a complete summary and evaluation of the timeline options, see Jason G. Duesing, “Counted Worthy: The Life and Thought of Henry Jessey, 1601–1663. Puritan Chaplain, Independent and Baptist Pastor, Millenarian Politician and Prophet” (PhD diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008), 123–9.

10 For further claims that Spilsbery was pastoring at Wapping in the 1630s, see Garry Stephen Weaver, Jr., “Hercules Collins: Orthodox, Puritan, Baptist” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 22; James M. Renihan, “John Spilsbury (1593-ca.1662/1668),” in The British Particular Baptists, vol. 1, eds. Michael A. G. Haykin and Terry Wolever (Springfield, Missouri: Particular Baptist Press, 2019), 19; Michael A. Thompson, Outside the Camp: John Spilsbury, the Pioneer of English Particular Baptists (Kingwood, TX: Charis Publications, 2011), 46.

11 Kreitzer, William Kiffen and His World, Part 3, 207.

12 A. C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London: The Kingsgate Press, 1947), 60. Underwood wrongly attributed the letter to John Thurloe.

13 Wright, The Early English Baptists, 92; Kreitzer, William Kiffen and His World, Part 3, 203–4.

14 Wright, The Early English Baptists, 92–3.

15 Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters In the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 326–7. Tredwell also appeared before the Court of High Commission alongside Magdalen Spilsbery, almost certainly John Spilsbery’s wife. See also Wright, The Early English Baptists, 92.

16 Kreitzer, William Kiffen and His World, Part 3, 204–8.

17 B. R. White, “Baptist Beginnings in Watford,” Baptist Quarterly 26, no. 5 (1976): 205–8, 205.

18 White, “Baptist Beginnings in Watford,” f.n. 4, 207.

19 Kreitzer, William Kiffen and His World, Part 3, 207.

20 Among others, see, for example, ‘this [Baptist] order was established by John Spilsbury at Wapping in 1633’, Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists: Traced by their Vital Principles and Practices from the Time of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the Year 1886 (New York: Bryan, Taylor, & Co., 1887), 460; Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society (London: Baptist Union Publication Department, 1908), 189; Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, The History of East London from the Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan and Co., 1939), 145; C. E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism From the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660–1688 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), 83; Robert W. Oliver, From John Spilsbury to Ernest Kevan: The Literary Contribution of London’s Oldest Baptist Church (London: Grace Publications Trust for The Evangelical Library, 1985), 6; Nuttall, “Another Baptist Ejection (1662): The Case of John Norcott,” 186; Michael A. G. Haykin, “Separatists and Baptists,” in The Oxford History Of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–c.1689, Vol 1, ed. John Coffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 124.

21 For Spilsbery, see Thomas Crosby, The History of the English Baptists, from the Reformation to the Beginning of the Reign of King George I, vol. 1 (London, 1738), 103; vol. 4 (London, 1740), 75; for Wapping, see Crosby, vol. 4, 8, 327; for Collins, see Crosby, vol. 3 (London, 1740), 103, 129. Wilson was the illegitimate son of John Walter, who founded The Times, see P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 56.

22 Walter Wilson, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses, in London, Westminster, and Southwark: Including the Lives of their Ministers, from the Rise of Nonconformity to the Present Time, vol. 1 (London: W. Button and Son, 1808), 410.

23 Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, vol. 1 (London, 1811), 144. For references to Walter Wilson, see vol. 1 (London, 1811), 102; Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, vol. 2 (London, 1814), xi, 336, 390; Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, vol. 3 (London, B. J. Holdsworth, 1823), 321, 323, et al.

24 Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, vol. 3, 294.

25 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 225–6; David J. Appleby, “Sermons and Preaching,” in The Oxford History Of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–c.1689, vol. 1, ed. John Coffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 449–50.

26 Nuttall, “Another Baptist Ejection (1662): The Case of John Norcott,” 186.

27 Wapping Church Book, 1677–1711, “Sept 1684,” (London: The Evangelical Library), 19.

28 Benjamin Keach, A Summons to the Grave or A Necessity of A Timely Preparation for Death (London: Ben Harris, 1676), A3.

29 Keach, A Summons to the Grave, A4, A5.

30 Ibid., A5.

31 Ibid., unpaginated.

32 Ibid., C2.

33 William Kiffen, ed., Baptism Discovered Plainly and Faithfully, According to the Word of God (London, 1694).

34 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, ed., Baptism Discovered Plainly and Faithfully, According to the Word of God (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1878), vi.

35 Nuttall, “Another Baptist Ejection (1662): The Case of John Norcott,” 186.

36 Wapping Church Book, 1677–1711, “2 Jul 1702,” 98.

37 Weaver and Haykin note ‘The date of his birth can be deduced from his tombstone in Bunhill Fields, which states that, when Collins died in 1702, he was in his 56th year. For the tombstone inscription, see Additional Manuscript 28516 (British Library), folio 26 verso’. Michael A. G. Haykin and Steve Weaver, Devoted to the Service of the Temple: Piety, Persecution, and Ministry in the Writings of Hercules Collins (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 2.

38 Cambridgeshire Parish Registers, vol. 4, Marriages (London: Phillimore & Co, 1907), 70. John Piggott, who delivered the funeral sermon for Collins, briefly remarked that Collins ‘began to be Religious early’ but no other detail is given. John Piggott, Eleven Sermons Preach’d Upon Special Occasions (London: John Darby, 1714), 235.

39 Weaver, Jr., “Hercules Collins: Orthodox, Puritan, Baptist,” 11.

40 Lambeth Palace Library, MS639, fos 139–294, “1669 Return of Nonconformist Conventicles,” fo. 221.

41 Weaver, Jr., “Hercules Collins: Orthodox, Puritan, Baptist,” 25.

42 Wapping Church Book, 1677–1711, ‘5 Feb 1677/8’, 3; Samuel Renihan, The Petty France Church, vol. 1 (Oxford: Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, 2019), 314, 317. In addition, in his funeral elegy, Benjamin Keach called John Norcott ‘my dear brother’, Keach, A Summons to the Grave, A3.