Noake's Worcestershire Page 217

KIDDERMINSTER. 217

was sufficient left for all labourers, whether orthodox or not, to perform in that down-trodden part of the vineyard. Mr. Baldwin, an ejected minister from Chaddesley in 1662, removed to Kidderminster, and meetings were held from house to house. The first large place of meeting was in Mill Street. Here they met till 1693, when Mr. Baldwin died, and soon afterwards the first meeting-house was erected on the site of the present one. One of the most respected pastors of the Independents was the Rev. Francis Spilsbury. John Wesley formed one of his districts at Kidderminster, the itinerant "brother". who travelled this circuit making his home here on Fridays and Sundays, at the house of Mr. James Bell, shopkeeper, Mill Street. The founder of the sect, on his visits to Kidderminster, would sometimes spend an hour with "that good man, Mr. Fawcett" (probably the Rev. B. Fawcett, then the Independent minister, or breakfast with Mr. Lister. In 1757 the house of Joshua Kettleby, of Church Street, was licensed for Baptist worship. Lark Hill Chapel was built a few years ago by a working man named John Bishop, at his own cost, for the benefit of a population of poor people, but it is now used as a church day school, and during Lent as a chapel. The founder emigrated to Australia a few years ago. VI. Schools for Church and Dissent, educating perhaps some 3,000 children. VII. A free library, which was voted for before Birmingham or other towns in the neighbourhood had taken a similar step - a fact which has occasioned great surprise to one who has no personal reason for supposing that the "upper ten thousand" of Kidderminster are great patrons of literature, or that the lower classes are very hard readers. We read that the place was noted for witchcraft in the seventeenth century, and Kidderminster must share with Dudley the credit of being among the latest places which maintained a professional fortune-teller. The exploits of Mrs. Swan, who pretended to discover stolen property for everybody else except what she herself had lost, and who died in an awfully tempestuous night