BBWDLEY, RIBBESFOBD, AND WRIBBENHALL. 41

enjoy a Saturday's market and five fairs in the year. There are Wesleyan, Baptist, and Quakers' chapels, besides Dowles and Wribbenhall churches just out of the town.

Touching Dissent, I find that there was a Baptist congregation here in the seventeenth century, and a notable disputation took place on New Year's Day, 1649, between Mr. John Tombes, the pastor, and the celebrated Baxter, in which the former seems to have had the best of it. Tombes, however,

afterwards married a rich widow, and conformed to the Church. Mr. Eccles, who commenced his preaching career at the age of sixteen, also laboured at Bewdley. It is singular that a Quakers' community should have remained here so long; they take no pains to make proselytes, and are everywhere diminishing. In 1771 Bewdley was included in the "Gloucestershire Circuit" of the Wesleyans, till in 1787 Worcester became the head of its own circuit. Mr. James Lewis, a shoemaker, near the church, at that time entertained