New Connexion of General Baptists was a revivalist off-shoot from the Arminian Baptist tradition, one of two main strands within the British Baptist movement. Formed in 1770, whilst the New Connexion owes its existence to Dan Taylor, the Yorkshire-born General Baptist pastor, its roots can be found among a group of independent Baptist congregations in the east Midlands loosely federated since the 1750s. Because the focal-point of this grouping was the Leicestershire village of Barton-in-the-Beans, near Market Bosworth, the federation came to be known as the Barton Society. Dan Taylor’s achievement was to unify the Barton Society’s congregations in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, with other Arminian chapels disenchanted with the General Baptist drift towards ’Free Christian’