Cowherd's meat-free movement

William Cowherd and Joseph Brotherton

On Sunday 29 January 1809, the Reverend William Cowherd stepped into the pulpit of his Salford church to issue his sermon and changed the world forever.

His subject was animals and, in particular, the eating of them.

Reading from Genesis in his King James Bible, he addressed the congregation:

"Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat."

With these words, Rev Cowherd began the first formal vegetarian movement in Britain.

There had been many vegetarians before him - the Ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras and famous writers Mary Shelley and Voltaire for example - and religions such as Buddhism and Zoroastrianism held vegetarian beliefs, but his sermon set in motion a chain of events that would lead to an abstinence from meat becoming separate from any religious beliefs and traditions.

Of course, Rev Cowherd's motivations were spiritual and religious - he saw the eating of meat as a symbol of man's expulsion from Eden (where Christians believe humans had lived harmoniously alongside animals) - but they also came from his egalitarian ideals.

His belief that 'all men are created equal' had been simply stretched to the idea that 'all species are created equal' - something that would ring true with many modern vegetarians.

Opposition to the movement

It didn't, however, ring quite so true with his fellow churchmen. The minister's church, Christ Church on King Street in Salford, was part of the Swedenborgian New Church (a Christian movement which developed from the writings of the eighteenth century Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg), who regarded the idea of vegetarianism as "a pernicious doctrine".

Joseph Brotherton

In fact, another local Swedenborgian minister, Reverend Richard Hindmarsh, who set up a chapel on nearby Bolton Street, said that if Cowherd's followers died, it would be precisely because they weren't eating meat, and referred sarcastically to the vegetarian church as the "Beefsteak Chapel".

Such was the rift between Cowherd's ideals and that of his church, that in the summer of 1809, he made the decision to leave the Swedenborgians behind and set up his own order, that of the Bible Christians, made up of his own congregation and those of three other churches (in Hulme and Ancoats).

What the rift did was formalise Cowherd's views on vegetarianism - to be part of his new church, the congregation were expected to abstain from meat - and plant the seed of a movement that would stretch across the UK and beyond.

Joseph Brotherton, a lay member of the original Christ Church, had been a strong supporter of Cowherd from the start, and took on his cause with gusto. After Cowherd's death, in 1816, it was Brotherton who became the minister at the church and later, after the reform act was passed in 1832, he became Salford's first MP - all the time preaching the values of egalitarianism and vegetarianism.

Brotherton's wife was also influential in spreading the 'no meat' gospel, when in 1812, she published the first cook book devoted to vegetarian meals.

Vegetarian America

And the Reverend Cowherd's words even spread across the Atlantic, when two ministers from his congregation, the Reverend William Metcalfe and the Reverend James Clark, set sail for the United States with thirty-nine other members of the Bible Christian Church in 1817.

Once there, they established a Stateside arm of the church and formed the nucleus of an American vegetarian movement.

Christ Church in Salford (inset: Cowherd's grave)

All of these things added together to help the formation, just under 40 years after Cowherd's original sermon, of the Vegetarian Society, who held their first annual meeting in Manchester at Hayward's Hotel in 1848.

Cowherd could never have known where the implications of his sermon would lead, but there is no doubt that the knowledge that he had started a movement that would lead to the formation of the world's first vegetarian society would have pleased him - though he might not have been quite so happy that he'd helped liberate the idea of not eating meat from any religious shackles.

Thanks to Derek Antrobus for his help in the writing of this article