The historiography problem was entrenched by the connexional response to Hugh Bourne's legacy. Understanding the movement's history, therefore, means understanding this complex man's character. On the one hand, he was passionately committed to the right of each individual to give witness as they chose. Describing approvingly an example of variety in religious exercises, he wrote ‘it was … like Judges xxi 25. Every man did that which was right’. On the other hand, he was punctilious in organisational matters and legalistic in thought and conduct; and he was not above sophistry in the latter regard in order to maintain his freedom in the former. So, for example, he asserted that an inconclusive conversation with the Wesleyan circuit superintendent represented a precedent permitting camp-meetings that was binding on the connexion as a whole, irrespective of subsequent decisions by higher councils; and later writers have accepted that threadbare claim.

At all times, therefore, his writings need to be minutely examined to establish the context in which he was writing; and the opening quotation is an excellent example of the dangers of failing to do so. This was Bourne's description of the movement's pre-history, written in 1844–5. Shorn of context and ignoring the italicised words, two writers read it as a poetic account of the PMC as a movement of the dispossessed, a case of the poor preaching to the poor, rather than an elite preaching at them. Yet those four words are the pivotal ones in exposing what Bourne meant: he was asserting that he began to build this movement from around 1800 by his ‘conversation-preaching’. It was a denial of the impact of the sparkling oratory of Clowes and the importance of Crawford in formalising his methods; it is not unwitting testimony of hard-up homeless congregations.

Bourne built his first chapel some years before the PMC came into existence, and the decision to build the 1811 Tunstall chapel was part of the process of coming-together of the movement. He believed that homeless congregations more often died out, and so was a keen builder from the outset. It was a principle that the movement followed faithfully.