THE HISTORY OF NONCONFORMITY IN PLYMOUTH. 59 
sixty years of age, and worn out by infirmities. Thomas Martyn 
took advantage of the Indulgence of 1672, and returning to Ply- 
mouth, became minister of a Nonconformist society. There are 
entries of baptisms by him in the Treville Street registers from 
June 12th, 1672, to February, 1675, and he did not die until 
1677. I believe it was upon his return that the division of the 
followers of the Ejected into two societies took place; for to this 
date the existence of two separate bodies can clearly be traced. 
Sherwill continued in the ministry until his sudden death, May 
15th, 1696. His last entry of baptism was on the 7th May pre- 
ceding. As the interments took place in the churchyard of the 
parish, where Sherwill could not officiate, he did not register 
burials ; but he entered the texts and occasions of funeral sermons 
preached by him from August 15th, 1662, until September 8th, 
1695. In his later years he had an assistant named By field, of 
whom Fox says that he had "the best sense and parts"*' of any 
Dissenter he had ever heard. Sherwill was succeeded by John 
Enty. 
Such briefly is a history of the establishment of the two con- 
gregations which represent in Plymouth the Bartholomew of 1662. 
Let us retrace our steps awhile, and consider the conditions under 
which that establishment took place. We have seen how their 
immediate founders, with the Baptist Cheare, were visited with 
imprisonment. Less fortunate than Martyn and Hughes, Cheare 
remained in bonds until 1665. Between 1662 and 1665 there- 
cords of borough expenditure clearly indicate that persecution was 
onward. In 1662-3 money was paid, not only for sending several 
persons to the gaol, but to poor people to give in evidence against 
them; and in 1663-4 Richard Philp and Abraham Appleby are 
entered as having been paid for their expenses in going to the 
assizes to give evidence against "the blind preacher.' 9 Who was 
this blind preacher ? Philp was an informer. He appears in the 
following year as having been paid, with John Wolfe, for giving 
evidence against Daniel Northerne, who from a subsequent entry 
we learn was pilloried. He must have been either a popular or a 
dangerous character, for it took five men to guard him in the 
pillory. 
William Jennens, the church- and-king mayor of 1662-3, was 
* John Fox, of Plymouth, whose MSS. are preserved at the Plymouth 
Public Library. 
