Christopher Ness

[1][2][3] When 23 years Ness returned to Yorkshire, where he became an Independent preacher at South Cliffe Chapel in his native parish, in Holderness, and then at Beverley, where he taught a school.

On Samuel Winter's election as provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1651, Ness was chosen as his successor in the living of Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire, though not in episcopal orders.

[1] After the Uniformity Act 1662, Ness was ejected from his lectureship, and he became a schoolmaster and private preacher at Clayton, Morley, and Hunslet.

He was excommunicated four times, and when in 1674 or 1675 a writ de excommunicato capiendo was issued against him, he moved to London, where he preached to a private congregation in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street.

In 1684 he had to conceal himself from the officers of the crown, who had a warrant for his arrest on the charge of publishing an elegy on the death of his friend Nathaniel Partridge, another nonconformist minister.