The 13th essay in The British Particular Baptists, Volume 1, Revised is on Andrew Gifford, Sr. (1641-1721)

Andrew Gifford was a powerful preacher and prominent Baptist minister active in the second half of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries. Known as the “Apostle of the West,” he lived and ministered all his life in Bristol, his influence spreading through much of the southwest of England as he preached and planted churches across Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Somerset. . . .[He] began ministry as an itinerant known for the power and impact of his sermons and who for the last forty-four years of his life was the pastor of a flourishing Particular Baptist congregation in the city of his birth. Between 1660 and 1688, Gifford, like many other Nonconformist ministers, bore the brunt of successive waves of intense persecution, which the authorities inflicted on those who refused to conform to the Church of England. --Robert Strivens