Ffeil NLW MSS 9108-9109D. - The 'Ilston Book',

A facsimile copy, bound in two volumes, of the 'Ilston Book', containing records of the Baptist Church established at Ilston, near Swansea, in 1649 - the earliest Baptist church in Wales - and of the church which its founder John Miles established in 1667 in Swansea, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The original register, which Miles took with him to America circa 1662-1663, is now in the John Carter Brown Library in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The Ilston records include a list of two hundred and sixty-one members of the church, 1649-1660; decrees and orders, and proceedings of general meetings, of the church and of the associated churches of Hay, Llanharan, Carmarthen, Llantrisant, and Abergavenny, and some records of excommunications, readmissions, and transfers, 1650-1657; 'A Briefe Narration of some Principall Providences of our Father towards vs . . . in this Church', being an historical account of the origin of the cause, incorporating copies of correspondence with Walter Prosser and James Hughes at Llanigon, 1649, and of a letter from John Collman, Barnstable, to 'Brother Myles', 1650; and copies of correspondence between the churches of Ilston, Hay, Llanharan, Carmarthen, Llantrisant (sometimes addressed together as the churches of Wales), of the Glasshouse (London), and of Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland, 1650-1656. The Swansea, New England, records, forming by far the greater part of the volume, consist of minutes for the period 1718-1847, and copies, made in 1855, of some correspondence to and from the church, 1683-1723. The earlier records of the church, together with those of Miles's first American church at Rehoboth, Mass., from 1663, have been torn away from the original register. Beginning at the end of the original register is 'The booke of the generall laws and liberties of [the] Inhabitants of the Jurisdiction New Plymouth, Collect[ed out] of the records of the generall Court and lately revised established and disposed into an Alphabeticall order a[nd] published by the Authority of the generall Court held a[t] Plymouth the 29th day of September . . . 1658', with some additions to 1665. The present facsimile of this section is bound separately as NLW MS 9109.