Name: Daniel Higgs

Author: Thomas Richards

Born at Chadwich in Worcestershire, he matriculated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and became B.A. in 1651. Almost immediately he was persuaded to join the Propagation forces in South Wales, more especially as an itinerant in Carmarthenshire; on the lapse of the Propagation Act in 1653, and under the more stabilizing policy of the Triers, he became minister of Rhossilly in Gower. This living he had to surrender under the Act of September 1660 (12 Chas. II, c. 17), but he had already been nominated by the king to the rectory of Porteynon, swore the necessary oaths, and signed the S. Davids subscription book. But the 1662 Act of Uniformity was too much for him; in November of that year a new rector was settled there ’ per nonconformitatem Danieli Higgs.’ Thereafter he appeared considerably as a sober but stout dissenter; he secured a licence to preach in his own house in Swansea (April, 1672), and was disappointed in not securing more places to preach in (he did actually, when in London, secure four other preaching places in Gower, but his name is not definitely associated with them as ‘teacher’). In 1675, he is (but rather indeterminately), called pastor of the powerful Swansea group of Independents. Higgs had poor health, and there is evidence that more than once he had to leave Swansea for his native Chadwich, where he died (before September) 1691.