Religion in Maidstone

Maidstone has long had a close religous connection, The manor is recorded, in about A.D.975, as being in the possession of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  The first church, that of St Mary’s, may have been built in the eighth century and by A.D.1070 it was said to be one of the most important and wealthy churches in Kent.  The dependent church of St Faith’s may have been built prior to A.D.1200, 

By about A.D.1207 the Archbishop had been gifted the Maidstone rectory and by the following century this had developed into a grander building and was one of his principal residences.  In the early 13^th century Archbishop Edmund proposed to move church administration from Canterbury to Maidstone.  The Canterbury monks opposed the idea fearing that they would lose the right to elect the Archbishop and even that the See might be moved to Maidstone.  Pope Gregory IX approved the project and in May 1239 work began in Maidstone on a great church for fifty prebends.  The monks appealed to Henry III who, in that year vetoed the project which then came to an end.

In 1261 Archbishop Boniface founded ‘Le Newark’ in the West Borough to accommodate ten poor men.  Latterly it was little used and in the later 14^th century the Archbishop Cortenay obtained permission from the Pope to use its income, together with that of St Mary’s to build a college of twenty-four itinerant priests and a larger church to replace St Mary’s.  By A.D.1398 All Saints church was completed.

Following Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the creation of the Protestant Church the Archbishop’s connections with Maidstone ceased, whilst Henry’s immediate successors, or their advisers, sold off the silver plate and vestments of All Saints, realising the sum of £200.  The quasi-religious Guild of Corpus Christi was dissolved.  The money raised from church goods was used to purchase the Guild Hall and the Guild’s lands, together with St Faith’s chapel and burial ground.  These were then vested in the town.

Dissent from State-ordained religion was to become a feature of Maidstone.  In 1522 Lutheran tracts were distributed in the High Street and in 1530 a Maidstone curate was burned at the stake for carrying Lutheran books between the Continent and England.  With the accession of Queen Mary all were required to embrace the Roman Catholic faith.  In the 1550’s an Anabaptist group was meeting in the town.  Three of its members were burned at Canterbury in 1555 whilst another died in Canterbury gaol.  There is no record of Anabaptists in Maidstone for half a century thereafter.  In 1557 two men and five women were burned at the stake in the Fair Meadow for refusing to accept the Catholic faith.

In the 1620-30’s a Separatist group in the town regarded the 1550 prayer book as popish, with its emphasis on ceremonial and vestments.  This was of great concern to Archbishop Laud who instructed Maidstone’s Dutch Calvinists to worship in the Protestant religion.  He reported to Charles I that there were ‘very many refractory persons to the Church of England about Maidstone’.

Quakers never had a strong foothold in Maidstone but in the mid-17^th century two such were placed in the stocks and whipped,  Nineteen others were incarcerated in the gaol in 1663.  Joseph Wright, the first Baptist pastor in the town was imprisoned over a long period.  In 1687 James I in a gesture of conciliation ordered the mayor and jurats to appoint him to the office of chief magistrate without requiring of him an oath of allegiance.

A Presbyterian congregation was using St Faith’s chapel in 1672 but moved to Market Street chapel when that was built.  By 1745 most of the congregation had become Aryans who worshipped not the Trinity but only God the Father.  William Hazlitt, father of the more famous essayist and critic was its Minister from 1770-1780.  Those who did not share Aryan views founded what was to become the Week Street Indeopendent Congregation.

A Census of Religious Worship in 1851 showed the Church of England as predominant with some 3,000 worshippers, principally at All Saints and Holy Trinity.  Wesleyan Methodists and the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection had some 300-500 worshippers each, whilst the three Baptist churches each had between 100-300 worshippers.  Other non-conformist chapels had insignificant attendances.

In 1828 the Catholic Emancipation Bill provoked strong opposition in Maidstone.  A leader was Sir John Wells, a Maidstone Member of Parliament.  He declared that he was prepared to fight in defence of the glorious Protestant Constitution ‘until he was up to his knees in blood’.  The Maidstone newspapers urged rejection of the Bill and a large anti-Catholic meeting took place in the Town Hall.  The Catholic church of St Francis in Week Street was not founded until 1859.