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Puritans in Bury in the 1600s

During the 1600s, increasing numbers of Christians were disaffected with the current state of the Church of England and sought its reform. This overlapped with parliament's struggle with the Stuart Kings, which culminated in the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the brief period of the Commonwealth, when Britain was ruled as a republic led by Oliver Cromwell, and briefly his son Richard. The monarchy was restored in 1660. 

Those who sought reform of the Church of England in the 1600s were known as Puritans. Some Puritans wanted the national church to be reorganised along Reformed/Presbyterian lines, and this is what more or less what happened during the Commonwealth period. Others, sometimes known as "Separatists", rejected the whole idea of a national church, and organised independent churches - what would later be known as the congregational churches. 

In the Lancashire town of Bury, in 1645, the incumbent parish vicar Travers, also a Puritan, was removed for suspected Royalist sympathies, and replaced with William Alt (Alte), assisted by Andrew Lathon and later Tobias Furness. From 1654 till 1660 Puritan John Lightfoot was minister at Bury. In 1660, at the time of the Restoration, John Greenhalgh was appointed. 

Down the road, in Holcombe, the Puritan minister, Henry Pendlebury, had been appointed in 1650. In 1662, when ministers were required to accept the "Book of Common Prayer" or resign, a large cohort of ministers, 2000 in total, left the Church of England. One of these was Henry Pendlebury (d. 1695). He remained in the area, and a member of an eminent local family, Richard Kay, offered Pendlebury a barn for holding services in the area near Walmersley (north of Bury), at Bast House, Badingstone house or on Bass Lane. Puritan sympathisers met for worship here until the chapel was completed on Dundee Lane in 1712. This was later complemented by the chapel on Bank Street/Silver Street in Bury completed in 1719. These places of worship were initially presbyterian, although by about 1790, they had veered into unitarian teaching, and the Trinitarian contingent left to form New Road Congregational Church.   

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