Allen, James

Author

(not in Praise! index), b Gayle, nr Hawes, N Yorks 1734, d Gayle 1804. He was preparing for ordination in the CofE but became for a time a follower of Benjamin Ingham, the Wesleys’ former colleague who turned first to the Moravians and then founded his own sect of ‘Inghamites’. Allen, however, joined the Sandemanians (formed in 1725) before himself splitting from them, ministering in a chapel he had built on his own estate at Gayle. He wrote some 100 hymns, and was the editor of and main contributor to the 1757/61 Kendal Hymn Book. Most of these groups had an evangelical foundation but were marked by their own distinctive doctrine and/or practice. James Allen was the great-uncle of one Oswald Allen (qv) and the son of an earlier one. See 745 and notes.