The first effective DWT receiver was Benjamin Sheppard. He began systematically to enact the terms of the will, oversaw DWT's efficient working, and answered its critics. The first library catalogue was compiled and published. DWT devoted much energy to managing property and to answering the demands of tenants. The trustees faced many cases of rent arrears and requests from tenants for leniency on various grounds.

Sheppard Becomes Receiver

Although Sheppard became ‘Receiver of the Trust Estate’ in Collier's place in March 1721, Chancery only confirmed Sheppard's appointment in 1725 when the minutes record that he had managed DWT ‘with great faith fittnesse and diligence’, for which he had received neither ‘satisfaction’ nor ‘recompence’. The trustees regarded an annual allowance of £70 as ‘reasonable and just’, though this more than doubled that allotted to Collier. The sum was not strictly for Sheppard's work as receiver, but ‘for all such services which as a general agent he hath been and is to be employed in’. At this time the trustees appointed a committee to consider ‘the State of the Trust, & the most effectuall methods to expedite the execution of it’. It comprised seven named trustees, with any other trustees willing to join them at North's coffee house, every Monday at 10 am, apart from the first Monday in the month.

Dr Williams's will set aside an eighth of the estate's income (after legacies and other deductions) for purchasing bibles, catechisms and ‘good practicall books in English & Welch’ which agreed with the demand for ‘saving literature’. In late 1721, Elizabeth Roberts requested such ‘books for … Wrexham according to the Dr's will’, causing John Evans to buy fifty English and ‘some Welsh bibles’ which Calamy sent, with one hundred catechisms, to her. A year later Evans sent her fifty bibles, five hundred Westminster Assembly catechisms, one hundred copies of Joseph Alleine's Alarme to the Unconverted, and fifty copies of Thomas Gouge's Christian Directions.

Mrs Roberts's (and her brother’s) concern for Wrexham's religion may have been prompted by the town becoming increasingly Tory after 1689. In 1710 the windows of the two chapels and of the town's leading dissenters’ homes were smashed.