Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 97 (2004), pp. 99-105 
Lodowick Muggleton — Native of Chippenham? 
by Kay S. Taylor 
Nineteenth-century Wiltshire antiquarians Canon Jackson and Rev. Daniell both perpetuated a popular local myth 
that the religious radical Lodowick Muggleton was born in Chippenham. Baptismal evidence from London, however, 
is readily available to dismiss the local version as fantasy. This paper takes another look at the life of Muggleton and his 
relationship to co-religionist John Reeve, and considers how the myth might have originated. 
In the best traditions of the nineteenth century, 
antiquarians in North Wiltshire were eager to 
provide biographical details of important or 
notorious figures with links to local towns and 
villages. One such renowned native who was claimed 
for Chippenham was the seventeenth-century 
religious radical, Lodowick Muggleton. Canon J.E. 
Jackson confidently asserted that this individual 
was a Wiltshire man, born ‘of poor though honest 
parents in the town of Chippenham’.' He 
apparently based his statement on a 1676 chronicle 
about Muggleton, which was reprinted in the 
Harleian Miscellany in 1744,’ entitled ‘A Modest 
Account of the Wicked Life of That Grand 
Impostor Lodowicke Muggleton’. This work 
purported to prove his professed commission from 
God to curse or bless individuals ‘to be but 
counterfeit and himself a cheat’. 
Members of the early Wiltshire Archaeological 
& Natural History Society avidly acquired 
information about Muggleton, and the Society’s 
collection includes a later copy of the forty-six page 
treatise by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton 
entitled, A Transcendental Spiritual Treatise upon 
Several Heavenly Doctrines.2 The Library’s bound 
volumes of ‘Wiltshire Tracts’ contain ‘An Account 
of the Prophet Muggleton’s Sufferings in the year 
1676 as related by our Friend, Mr POWELL, Who 
was an Eye-witness to the whole’. This twenty-four 
page account was printed in Southwark in 1808 
under the cover title of ‘A True Account of the Trial 
and Sufferings of Lodowick Muggleton One of the 
two last prophets and Witnesses of the Spirit, left by our 
Friend Powell’.* In addition, a box in the library 
contains two ‘notes on distinguished Chippenham 
natives’ being compiled for a nineteenth-century 
article in WANHM, by unnamed authors.’ The first 
appears to be by Canon Jackson, and both sets of 
notes are unsympathetic to their subject, so it is 
unlikely that they would want to claim him as a 
‘distinguished Chippenham native’ unless they felt 
sure of their facts. Unfortunately the sources used 
for their information are not recorded with these 
‘notes’. 
Nearly forty years after Jackson’s assertion the 
myth was given another airing by the Rev. J.J. 
Daniell, the rector of Langley Burrell, who stated 
categorically in his 1894 History of Chippenham that, 
‘Ludowic Muggleton, born in Chippenham in 1609 
of poor though honest parents, was by trade a 
tailor’.° 
Rev. Daniell admitted to using the collections of 
the late Canon Jackson to supplement his own 
researches. Only a few years later a correspondent 
to Wiltshire Notes and Queries challenged this claim 
by pointing out that Lodowick Muggleton 
appeared in the parish register of St Botolph’s 
Bishopsgate, London, where he was baptised as the 
third child of John Muggleton. The register 
recorded the births of John’s children as Margaret 
5 Lee Crescent, Sutton Benger, Wilts, SN15 4SE, and University of the West of England 
