But rich he was of holy thought and werk.
He was, also, a learned man, a clerk
That Christe’s gospel gladly wolde preche;
His parischens devoutly wolde he teche.
Benign he was and wondrous diligent,
And in adversite full patient.”
Chaucer.
METHODISM was introduced into Kesterton in the days of John Wesley himself, and in the plain, square, old-fashioned chapel, with its arched windows, brick walls, and hip roof, red tiled and high peaked, you might see the very pulpit in which the grand old apostle of the eighteenth century preached more than a hundred years ago. The chapel stood back from the main street, and to get at it you had to go through a narrow passage, for the fathers of the Methodist Church, unlike their more self-assertive successors, seem to have courted a very modest retirement for the Bethels which they built for God. Behind the chapel there is a small burial-ground, in which are the honoured graves of those to whom Kesterton Methodism owes its origin, and who did its work and bore its fortunes in its earlier struggles for existence. On the other side of an intervening wall, in the midst of a little garden, capable of much improvement in the matter of tidiness and cultivation, stands the “preacher’s house.” It is not by any means an imposing structure, and taxes to the utmost the contrivance of its itinerant tenants to find sleeping accommodation for the “quiver full” of youngsters with which they are commonly favoured in an unusual degree. In the matter of furniture the less said the better; suffice it to say that it could not be regarded as extravagant in quality or burdensome in quantity. Indeed, it was open to serious imputations in both those directions; at least so thought the Rev. Theophilus Clayton, who had latterly become located there, and seemed likely to go through the maximum term of three years, to the high satisfaction of the people, and with a moderate measure of contentment to himself.
Kesterton rejoiced in the dignity of being a circuit town, and at the time to which these annals refer, the circuit extended from Meriton in the east to Amworth Marsh in the west; and from Chessleby on the north to Bexton on the south, an area of nineteen miles by twenty-one. There was a circuit horse and gig provided for the longer journeys, but as the “better days” which both of them had seen smacked of the mediæval age, the gig was as little remarkable for polish or paint as the horse was either for beauty or speed.