This book began life as a doctoral thesis and still contains some traces of that earlier existence but let me reassure the reader, whose spirits are already sinking at that news, that it has been thoroughly revised, re-structured and expanded for publication. There is probably more local detail here now than a strictly academic readership might appreciate and perhaps still too much information on the historiography of Methodism for the more general reader. I can only crave your patience and suggest you skip to the bits that are of more interest to you.

The bulk of the material is arranged chronologically in three chapters that relate to the three main periods of Methodist growth. Each chapter begins with a narrative and then moves on to an analysis of a series of themes – the social constituency of Methodism, the internal life of the movement, its impact on local politics and the reaction of the wider community. A fourth chapter considers how this picture of Methodism in Bedfordshire squares with the existing historiography of Methodism and a final essay offers a critical evaluation of the main sources for Methodist history.

My purpose from the outset has been to produce a piece of history that views its subject matter from the bottom up, rather than the top down. It aspires to be a history of the involvement of ordinary people in Methodism, rather than of the movement's institutions (though they will make their appearance) or its official doctrines. Ordinary people, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did not leave vast paper trails in their wake and I have had to draw on hundreds of often tiny fragments of evidence to build up this picture of their activities. Everything that I have tracked down has found its place here. If the final account is partial in some respects, then it is at least shaped by the priorities of those who produced the original documents, and the accidents of history that decided which ones would survive, rather than by the selections of my own prejudices.

Most religious history has been written by religious people and most Methodist history has certainly been written by Methodists. Perspectives have often been shaped by apologetic considerations and there has been a pronounced tendency to hagiography.