Ilston Book

The Ilston Book is the earliest record of a Baptist church in Wales, and is so named after the location of its meeting place near the ruins of the old Trinity well at Ilston Beck in the Gower Peninsula, the site of a pre-Reformation chapel, now in ruins. This "Cromwellian" church was founded in 1649 during the English Civil War under the Calvinistic leadership of John Myles (aka John Miles) (1621 - 1683). Thus this earliest Welsh Baptist church stood in the Particular Baptist tradition.

The Ilston Book was preserved because Myles took it with him when he and the whole congregation emigrated to North America in 1663, where they settled in a town they named Swansea, Massachusetts. The original is held in the Library of Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, but is not open to public view. The full list of 261 members up to 1660 is recorded, and shows that they travelled from a wide geographic area in South Wales.

References

• The Ilston Book : earliest register of Welsh Baptists / transcribed and edited by B.G. Owens (1996) Aberystwyth : National Library of Wales. ISBN 0-907158-87-0.
• Henry Melville King, Rev. John Myles and the Founding of the First Baptist Church in Massachusetts (Providence, RI: Preston & Rounds, Co. 1905).
• Gwent, Mervyn & Evans, Evan, A portrait of Gower, Swansea : Royal Institution of South Wales; Gower Society, 1952 — has a chapter about Ilston Beck, John Myles and the Ilston Book.