Heritage Open Day: 'Dissenters' were English Protestants whose relationship with the Church of England became so fraught they needed their own burial ground. About Dissenters.
Dissenters were Protestants whose disagreements with the Church of England in the 17th and 18th centuries led to separation from it and to persecution. The split became so severe that Dissenters could not be buried in C of E churchyards so needed burial grounds of their own.
The Dissenter community was an important part of the city's commercial, religious and political life, particularly during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. At one time Dissenters made up some 40% of the Protestant population of Exeter.