Henry Piggin 1822-1887 |
From the age of 24 till his death, Henry Piggin was a minister of a breakaway English church, the Methodist New Connexion, which had been established in 1797 as an independent organization and re-merged with other Methodist groups in 1907. This splinter group was often described by its rivals as the Kilhamites, after its founder, Alexander Kilham. It was particularly strong in the Nottingham area. Among its most prominent preachers in the late 1850s was William Booth, later to found the Salvation Army. In 1861, the New Connexion church had a little over 30,000 members and about 240 ministers.
The Methodist New Connexion was what we would nowadays call a bottom-up organization, with the privileges of its clergy tightly circumscribed. In all its committees, there had to be parity between clergy and lay people, and its national president only held office for a single year before giving up the place to another. The clergy had no academic theological training at all. The democratic methods of the group may have been laudable, but a clergyman's position was a weak one, as he could easily be dismissed for even minor misbehaviour, and this may have made the group even more cautious and conventional in all its doings than other Christian churches. News reports suggest the annual conference of the church appear must have been dreary and tedious, with much reading of dull and dry accounts.
A New Connexion circuit preacher was obliged to live an itinerant life, with a single man normally moving every year and a married one moving every second year. This explains Piggin's frequent moves in the list below. The annual salary paid by the New Connexion to a married preacher was meagre: 78 pounds, plus provision of a house and furniture, a medical-expenses allowance and an average of 8 pounds per child, according to Baggaly in 1862 (pages 135 and 200).
Henry PIGGIN 1877 NTT
Methodist leader, see Bulwell family
The Ministerial Gift. An Ordination Charge ... at the Methodist New Connexion Conference, Leeds, 1877.. pp. 19. H. Webber: London, [1877.] 8o.
from: OPAC pre 1976 Reference Collections file: British Library, searched via URL: http://opac97.bl.uk/ on 1999/05/17
also: author of a letter to hymnologist Daniel Sedgwick (1814-1879) in the Julian Collection at the British Library MS department (Add 57502 f. 54)
Piggin (Henry). Methodist minister Letter to D. Sedgwick 1872
searched via URL:
- extracted 2000/08
also: recipient of letter from Prime Minister Gladstone: See: The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-ministerial Correspondence: January 1875-December 1880; ed H.C.G. Matthew, Oxford University Press, 1986; page 255, vol 9: 1877/10/04: "Wrote to Rev. H. Piggin ..." 1877/10/07: "Read Mr Piggin's Charge..." (i.e. The Ministerial Gift)
- extracted 2005/07/21 on Amazon Look Inside
Henry PIGGIN 1870 NTT
pp. 53, 54 of:
Heralds of the Cross; a memorial of one hundred years of United Methodist Lay Ministry in and around Nottingham, ed. by Rev. R.J. Bell and J.D. Crosland, Long Eaton, Butler, 1926. Note that this book was published after the Kilhamites had rejoined the mainstream Methodists. See also the book's reference to James Piggin.