Many people will be familiar with the name John Wesley. When pressed for more information, they may recall that (1) he founded the Methodist church, (2) he had a brother called Charles, and (3) that he had a tremendous work ethic and travelled many thousands of miles in order to preach to people across the British Isles. Wesley’s travels were largely on foot or horseback and it is estimated that he journeyed around 4,000 miles a year.

Wesley was born into a large Church of England family in Lincolnshire – his father, Samuel, was a rector and his mother, Susannah, deeply devout. Originally John and his brother, Charles, were ordained as Church of England priests and set sail on a missionary journey to America in 1735. The brothers’ lack of success there brought them home, disillusioned, but while listening to a sermon in Aldersgate Street, London, during a Moravian meeting in 1738, Wesley underwent a spiritual experience that led him to revolutionise his approach to ministry. Inspired by Martin Luther’s words about salvation by faith and God’s grace being freely available to all people – not just to those of the higher classes who were welcomed into churches to participate in the liturgy – he joined the preaching ministry of George Whitefield. Although the pair were later to disagree doctrinally, it was from Whitefield that Wesley learned the example of open-air preaching to the masses.

Wesley believed that it was a person’s duty to Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can .

He lived by his own words and for half a century after his return from America Wesley travelled the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland, preaching to crowds in the open air when not welcomed into chapels and churches. Fortunately for posterity, he wrote comprehensive diary entries detailing the journeys he took. Some remain unpublished, but a great deal from 1735-1790 can be read online in the online reference library at data website www.TheGenealogist.co.uk, and the material they contain is rich in descriptions of social conditions in the 18th century.

Although he preached that The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness, but social holiness, Wesley’s writing describes social reality, the poverty and desperate living conditions of those that he met.

In the 1700s the poor man was still standing far from the gate of the rich man’s castle. Low Fell, just outside Gateshead, was founded in the 1500s as a mining village. By the 1700s it as a larger colliery town. Wesley visited Low Fell twice, in 1771 and 1784, to preach to the working-class pitmen and their families. He wrote that he found a pathless community of tinkers, pitmen and quarrymen: Twenty or thirty wild children ran around us. They could not properly be said to be either clothed or naked. One of the largest had a ragged dirty blanket hung about her. They looked as if they would have swallowed me up.

Illness and death were ever-present in the 1700s: near Bath, Wesley writes of seeing a coffin being carried into St. George’s church, with many children attending… a corpse of one of their school fellows, who had died of the smallpox. Other travels detail sick people half starved both with cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain. Wesley often comments on people’s state of living and conduct: in Bolton there was a vast number of people, but many of them utterly wild; Edinburgh, he says, was one of the dirtiest cities I had ever seen; in Hull conditions were miserable. Of St Ives, he complains of an accursed thing among [the people]: well-night one and all bought or sold uncustomed goods .

Yet he also comments positively on many of the places that he visits, and people he encounters. In Ireland, Clonmell is the pleasantest town, beyond all comparison, which I have yet seen; in Wales, Bangor is delightful beyond expression; Liverpool, he writes, is the neatest, best-built towns I have seen in England, and he praises the courtesy of its inhabitants. In Todmorden, people were rough enough in outward appearance, but their hearts were as melting wax .

Wesley Timeline

In the print edition
Read about the temperance movement, and Jill Morris’ article on non-Christian religions in Britain, in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available fromdiscoveryourancestors.co.uk