Bristol
A city in the west of England. George Fox and Margaret Fell were married there in a Friends’ meeting in 1669, and John Wesley began to preach in the open air beside it on 2 April 1739; the first stone of a room for its societies was laid that May.
George Fox writes that he and Margaret Fell took each other in marriage in the Friends’ meeting-house at Broadmead in Bristol; the editor of his Journal gives the year, 1669, from the register of Bristol Friends (Fox, Journal ch. 17).
John Wesley reached Bristol on 31 March 1739 and found George Whitefield preaching in the fields. On 2 April he preached “in the highways” himself, from a little eminence in a ground adjoining the city, and in May he took possession of a piece of ground in the Horsefair, where the first stone of a room for the societies of Nicholas Street and Baldwin Street was laid on the twelfth (Wesley, Journal, 31 March – 12 May 1739). See George Fox and the Quakers and John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism.
What happened here
- 24 May 1738, firm dateJohn Wesley and the Rise of Methodism
On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London, the clergyman John Wesley feels his heart “strangely warmed”. The next year he begins to preach in the open air at Bristol, and the societies he and his brother Charles organise come to be called Methodist.