100 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
on 23 June 1605, Ruth on 1 November 1607, and 
finally John on 30 July 1609.’ However, in his own 
version of his early life Muggleton stated that: 
He [1. e. John Muggleton] had three Children by my 
Mother, two Sons and one Daughter, I was the 
youngest and my Mother lov’d me. 
So it would appear that his autobiographical 
information should be treated with some caution. 
The Dictionary of National Biography (D.N.B.) entry 
for Muggleton reiterated the information that he was 
born in Bishopsgate in 1609. However, the compiler 
was wary of the accuracy of some of the 
contemporary records he used for his research, 
warning particularly against placing any reliance on 
the so-called biography contained in the Harleian 
Miscellany.” So who was Lodowick Muggleton? What 
did he do to earn the title of Grand Impostor? And 
why was he thought to hail from Chippenham? 
Lodowick Muggleton gave his name to one of 
the most enduring but peculiar religious sects to be 
formed in England in the middle of the seventeenth 
century, which he founded with fellow tailor, John 
Reeve. The Muggletonians had no preachers and 
did not follow any of the usual forms of public 
worship, so their meetings were not included in the 
lists of the registrar general. The members called 
themselves ‘believers in the third commission’ in 
recognition of their two founders’ ‘commission 
from God’ which they claimed to have received in 
1652. The sect was still active in 1829 when they 
published the ‘Divine Songs of the Muggletonians, 
> which the Rev. Daniell described as a curious 
collection of words to ‘accompany the howlings of 
these wretched fanatics’.'° George Williamson 
talked of the Muggletonians and the Quakers as 
being the only small sects from the seventeenth 
century to survive into the twentieth century.'! 
Daniell estimated that ‘this extraordinary set of 
religionists’ only had one place of worship in 
London and not three more in the whole of 
England at the end of the nineteenth century.’ The 
last known member of the sect, a Philip Noakes of 
Matfield in Kent, died in 1979, although there may 
yet be other survivors.” At its height in the later 
seventeenth century the sect claimed followers in 
many counties (Figure 1),'4 although apparently 
none in Wiltshire, which makes the interest of 
Jackson and Daniell et al all the more intriguing. 
Doctrinally Muggletonians held that God was 
one and eternal, with a material body; that the soul 
was mortal, rising with the body at the 
Resurrection; and that the world contained only 
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Fig. 1. Distribution of known Muggletonians, c. 1652 — 1700'° 
two races — the cursed and the blessed. The sect had 
no formal pattern of worship: not only did they 
have no preachers but they did not pray or read 
either. Members were only required to believe in 
Lodowick Muggleton. His detractors labelled him 
the ‘Grand Impostor’ for claiming such god-like 
powers. Outwardly the sect bore some similarities 
to the Quakers, calling their adherents Friends, and 
being opposed to war and the persecution of 
individuals for conscience sake. However 
Muggleton and his supporters scorned the Quaker 
doctrine of the inner light in all people and, in 
return, the Quakers distanced themselves from 
association with them. William Penn wrote of 
Muggleton as a ‘false Prophet and Impostor, guilty 
of ungodly and_ blasphemous _practices.’!® 
Muggleton retaliated by referring to Penn as, 
an ignorant spatter-brained Quaker, who knows no 
more what the true GOD is, nor His secret decrees, 
than one of his coach-horses doth. 
His condemnation of the Quakers was expressed 
in a number of published tracts,!’ such as ‘The 
Neck of the Quakers Broken’, in 1663, and ‘The 
Looking Glass for George Fox and other Quakers, 
wherein they may see themselves to be Right Devils’, 
in 1668. His last published work was ‘The Answer 
to William Penn’, in 1673, in reply to Penn’s The 
New Witnesses Proved Old Heretics of 1672. 
