A very short history of the Old Meeting
The origins of the Old Meeting can be traced to 1680 when George Seal, who had been ejected from a parish in south Wales, became pastor of a society of dissenters at Marshfield. George Seal appears to have been succeeded by Robert Paterson, followed by Angel Shapland, who died in 1748. The next minister was Evan Thomas and it was during his ministry that the congregation raised funds to erect the meeting house.
In the later eighteenth century the congregation declined, and the cause in the town would have perished had it not been for the Somerset, Gloucester and Wiltshire Unitarian Missionary Association. In 1825 the Association engaged Henry Hawkes, a Glasgow student, as minister. Then Rev. Samuel Martin, a missionary in Devon and Cornwall, was persuaded to take over. These ministers more than doubled the congregation and established a Sunday-school, a Fellowship Fund and a Library. Shortly after, however, Rev. Martin was called to ministry at Trowbridge, and the congregation again lacked a settled minister. The chapel was thereafter served for a time by lay preachers from Bristol and Bath including, from the 1840s to the late 1850s, James Jeffery of the Bath Unitarian Trim Street Chapel. The last minister was Rev. John Shearman, formerly of the Montague Street Unitarian mission in Bristol. The meeting house was closed in 1886.
