More on Stow

The entry in British History Online on Stow on the Wold under the heading Protestant Nonconformity includes this:

In the 1660's dissenters held open-air meetings near Stow and three inhabitants were fined for dissent, and in 1676 there were 55 nonconformists in the parish. The earliest known meeting house in Stow, licensed in 1690, belonged to the Friends, who had a community there by 1670. In the mid-18th century there were said to be 15 Quakers, or two families. Their meeting was in the 'Red Lion' yard, and although it was disused by 1850 and demolished in the early 20th century the graveyard adjoining it survived in 1961. There were then seven headstones of 1818–55, six for members of the Pegler family.

A newly built Baptist meeting house, off Sheep Street, was licensed in 1700 and one of the two dissenting preachers in Stow in 1715 was a Baptist. In 1735 there were 44 Baptists, who then ran a school and took out further licenses in 1736, 1765 and 1772. The minister's support was helped by a bequest of £100 in trust by Joseph Morse, by will dated 1782; his initials and his wife's are inscribed on the house next to the manse in Sheep Street. The father of George Payne (1781–1848), the Congregationalist divine, was Baptist minister in Stow in the late 18th century but earlier, and for the first quarter of the 19th century, the Baptists in Stow relied on ministers from Bourton-on-the-Water and Naunton. In 1851 there was a morning congregation of 200 and in 1852 a new chapel was built standing back from Sheep Street and approached through an archway beside the manse; it is of rubble, with long and short chamfered stone quoins, roundheaded windows, and a Welsh slate roof.