That was the big question for 17th century English people in matters of religion, including the inhabitants of the village of East Budleigh, if they wished to avoid being persecuted for their beliefs.
Whether to accept the ritual and beliefs of the Established Church of England, or to follow a non-conformist route and be known as a Dissenter. Such was the route chosen by the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims of 1620 when they sailed away from England to America on board the Mayflower.
The historian Clifford K. Shipton wrote that in his
religious beliefs Roger Conant, baptized at East Budleigh’s All Saints’ Church in
1592, was far from being a non-conformist like the Plymouth Pilgrims.
Roger would have found ‘the simple ceremonies at Plymouth
lacking in the religious consolation he had experienced in the ritual of the
old church at East Budleigh’, wrote Shipton in his biography of Salem’s
founder. ‘He would have been deterred by their radical religious tenets which
were foreign to his upbringing in the church.’
So the case of a 17th century vicar of that East Budleigh
church is interesting, especially as this was Richard Conant, Roger’s nephew.
Born in 1622, the son of Richard Conant and his wife Jane, née Slade, he
studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, famous as a hotbed of religious
non-conformity. In 1644, during the English Civil War between the King and
Parliament, he replaced the royalist vicar of Otterton, Richard Venn, ejected
by parliamentary officials.
With the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, it was
the turn of Richard Conant the non-conformist to be ejected as vicar. However,
from 1672 until his death in 1688, we find him as vicar of East Budleigh. He
had apparently agreed to conform to the Established Church.
But had he really? Two books from his study, entitled A
Saint or a Brute and The Life of Faith and mentioned
in his Will, stand out as indicating perhaps that his religious sympathies
still lay with Dissenters. The author was the English theologian Richard
Baxter, who, having been expelled from the Church of England, became one of the
most influential leaders of the non-conformist movement. Nowadays he is
commemorated by the Church of England on 14 June.
Interesting for American descendants of the Conant family is
that the bequest of both books was made to his ‘dear sister Mrs Mary Veren of
Salem in New England’. Both Mary Conant and her sister Jane had followed Roger
Conant to New England, crossing the Atlantic in 1635.
A further point of interest is that Richard Conant’s
appointment as vicar of All Saints’ Church had been supported by Richard Duke,
the MP and lord of the Manor of Otterton who held the advowson of East Budleigh
– the right to appoint Anglican clergy. He has been described by historian
Eveline Cruickshanks as a possible Dissenter, and has been noted as providing
stone for the building of Salem Chapel, a place of worship for non-conformists
on the outskirts of East Budleigh.
By the time of the 1744 Episcopal Visitation Returns – the process by which bishops of the Church of England gathered information about their diocese – East Budleigh seems to have had more than the average number of dissenters. The vicar, Matthew Mundy declared that there were ‘About a Hundred Families in the Parish; thirty of which, or near that Number, are Dissenters of the Presbyterian sort’, along with ‘one woman in the Parish supposed to be a Roman-Catholick’.
Pictured here is a page from Richard Baxter’s A Saint or
a Brute alongside the list of East Budleigh’s vicars.
If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at
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