The 'Ilston Book',

A facsimile copy, bound in two volumes, of the 'Ilston Book', containing records of the Baptist Church established at Ilston, near Swansea, in 1649 - the earliest Baptist church in Wales - and of the church which its founder John Miles established in 1667 in Swansea, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The original register, which Miles took with him to America circa 1662-1663, is now in the John Carter Brown Library in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The Ilston records include a list of two hundred and sixty-one members of the church, 1649-1660; decrees and orders, and proceedings of general meetings, of the church and of the associated churches of Hay, Llanharan, Carmarthen, Llantrisant, and Abergavenny, and some records of excommunications, readmissions, and transfers, 1650-1657; 'A Briefe Narration of some Principall Providences of our Father towards vs . . . in this Church', being an historical account of the origin of the cause, incorporating copies of correspondence with Walter Prosser and James Hughes at Llanigon, 1649, and of a letter from John Collman, Barnstable, to 'Brother Myles', 1650; and copies of correspondence between the churches of Ilston, Hay, Llanharan, Carmarthen, Llantrisant (sometimes addressed together as the churches of Wales), of the Glasshouse (London), and of Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland, 1650-1656. The Swansea, New England, records, forming by far the greater part of the volume, consist of minutes for the period 1718-1847, and copies, made in 1855, of some correspondence to and from the church, 1683-1723. The earlier records of the church, together with those of Miles's first American church at Rehoboth, Mass., from 1663, have been torn away from the original register. Beginning at the end of the original register is 'The booke of the generall laws and liberties of [the] Inhabitants of the Jurisdiction New Plymouth, Collect[ed out] of the records of the generall Court and lately revised established and disposed into an Alphabeticall order a[nd] published by the Authority of the generall Court held a[t] Plymouth the 29th day of September . . . 1658', with some additions to 1665. The present facsimile of this section is bound separately as NLW MS 9109.

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Title based on contents.

Preferred citation: NLW MSS 9108-9109D.

April 2011.

Description compiled by Bethan Ifan for the retrospective conversion project of NLW MSS. The following source was used in the compilation of this description: Handlist of Manuscripts in the National Library of Wales, Volume III (Aberystwyth, 1961);

Usual copyright laws apply.

See also NLW MS 22128D, which contains transcripts by the Reverend John Evans (1843-1897), Westerly, Rhode Island of extracts from the Welsh portion of the 'Ilston Book'.

See D. Hugh Matthews, 'John Miles a Bedyddwyr Ilston' in Trafodion Cymdeithas Hanes y Bedyddwyr (1999), pp. 1-5; Glanmor Williams, 'John Miles, Ilston and the Baptist denomination in Wales' in Minerva (Royal Institution of South Wales), Vol. 7 (1999), pp. 11-18; D. Densil Morgan, 'John Myles (1621-83) and the future of Ilston's past ...' in Baptist Quarterly (Baptist Historical Society (Great Britain)), Vol. 38 (October 1999), pp. 176-184.

Published

Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru = The National Library of Wales