This West Country movement, which had split from the Primitive Methodists, established a chapel here in 1850.
The Religious Census (1851) notes that the building they used was erected some twenty years previously. This could suggest that it was the former Primitive Methodist chapel which had been vacated on the opening of a new one in 1849.
Situated on Lynn Street, the chapel accommodated 96. Henry Bunce is named as the minister at the time of the census. Mr Bunce was also minister of a chapel founded in 1851 in the village of Castle Acre, near Swaffham.
Quite what motivated this group to set up in rural Norfolk is unclear; what is clear is that Norfolk was not fertile ground for the Bible Christians – the 1851 ecclesiastical census lists only two of their chapels in Norfolk.
The Swaffham chapel survived for little more than twenty years.
Source
Census of Religious Worship 1851 (Norfolk). Ed J Ede and N Virgoe 1998
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Thank you for your detailed reply which confirms what I suspected. To misquote “Star Trek” “They are Bible Christians David, but not as we know them” Just as William Bryan came to a parting of the ways with Wesleyan Methodism in 1815, founded a new connexion and thought ‘Bible Christian’ was a good name for the new body, at a very similar time (1816) a man called William Cowherd led a group of disaffected Swedenborgians who opened a chapel in Salford, and also chose to call themselves ‘Bible Christians’. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Christian_Church_(vegetarian)) their main characteristic was that they were vegetarians, being pioneers of the practice in this country. They were also abstainers from alcohol, like many nineteenth century Methodists. Unlike “our’ Bible Christians, they did not flourish, or rather their ideas did not travel outside Salford and Ancoats. Your discovery of a group of them in Norfolk between 1840 and 1909 is an important change in the narrative.
Thank you for your comments Philip. I also had reservations about Mr Bunce and his chapels. However, I assumed that the 1851 religious census entries (Swaffham and Castleacre) would have been more or less accurate. I now wonder if Bunce’s “Bible Christians” were a local independent Methodist movement that never caught on. A mystery indeed! As you point out, he does not appear in the 1851 population census returns, but neither does the Wesleyan minister who, like Bunce, had signed the relevant entry in the religious census.
I have come across other references to Bible Christians in Norfolk. According to the press, they arrived in King’s Lynn around 1870, and for a while met in the Albion Hall in Broad Street. But there are doubts regarding their denomination, with the press incorrectly referring to them as ‘Plymouth Brethren, otherwise known as Bible Christians’. To add to the confusion, they were also called ‘Cowherdites’.
In 1904, Kelly’s Directory lists Bible Christians in Lynn holding meetings in a Gospel Hall in Blackfriars Street (possibly the former Zion Calvinist chapel). As Kelly was still listing them five years later, they could not have joined the uniting churches of 1907. Hence, probably not Bible Christians after all.
(Ref: Lynn News 11 Jan 1873)
The Bible Christian mission to Norfolk, as evidenced by this chapel and the one at Chapel Acre is a mystery. Neither the Jubilee Memorial (the history of the Connexion until 1864) nor the Bible Christian Magazine mentions any work in Norfolk. Henry Bunce is unknown as a Bible Christian minister: of more concern is that despite being present in Lynn Street Swaffham on March 30th 1851, he failed to be noticed by the population census enumerators on that occasion. Who were these Bible Christian Methodists, and who was Henry Bunce?
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