1652

The year 1652 is etched in the minds of Quakers. It is generally considered to be the year Quakers began, but the reality is not quite that straightforward. We ask Geoffrey Durham to tell us more. This is what he said;

“George Fox was a striking figure, a big, burly man with piercing eyes and a way with words. When he was nineteen in 1643, he left his parents’ home in rural Leicestershire and started to wander. He didn’t know where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do, he just wandered from place to place, picking up odd bits of work as a shoemaker, sleeping under hedges and talking to people about religion.

“He believed that every person had an inward light that would shine out and reveal the truth if it wasn’t obscured by materialism – and he said so to everyone he met, wherever he went. And after a while he began to attract big crowds – talking at street corners, attracting followers, antagonising the people who heard him. He started to become well-known as an agitator. And trouble followed him everywhere. He was thrown into ponds, beaten with sticks and generally reviled.

“But what interests me – almost more than anything else – is his absolute refusal ever to use any violence back. He wasn’t consciously proclaiming peace – that came later – and he was often angry and confrontational when he was challenged, but he never returned any physical violence. He persisted in not using what he called ‘outward weapons’. He stared people in the eye and he engaged them in conversation. And his weapon was his clarity and his plain speaking. And that has become something of a model for Quakers today.

“At some point towards the end of 1651, beginning of 1652, he seems to have taken a decision to move away from the east Midlands. Up until then, he’d concentrated his efforts in the area he was from – Leicester, Derby, Nottingham – but during the spring of 1652 he made a change. You might have expected him to go south to London, but he didn’t. He headed over the Pennines towards the area we now know as Cumbria.

“For a long time that whole region had been a real thorn in the side of government and the local authorities. It was said in 1649 that it was home to around 30,000 impoverished, destitute families. Church leaders had given up on it completely, and so people there were distrustful of religion. And evangelical groups were starting to encourage people to hold services in their houses and ignore the churches altogether, and I’ve got a feeling that maybe George had some inside information about that.

“And so at some time during the late spring of 1652 George Fox started to travel north. It took him a week or two, and he made some stops along the way. The most memorable of those was a sudden impulse to climb a hill he just happened to come across – Pendle Hill in north-east Lancashire, in the Pennines near Clitheroe. He decided to climb it. It was quite a struggle to get to the top – it’s high and very steep – but when he made to the summit he was confronted by an amazing view. He could suddenly see the whole of Lancashire beneath him, all the towns and villages, right up to the point where the land meets the sea. And he experienced a moment of perfect crystal clarity. He wrote about it afterwards: The Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.

“I think he must have had the idea at the back of his mind for some time that he had it in him, if chose to, to form some kind of movement. That what he had was completely original and needed to be shared more widely. And at that moment he realised that it might be possible. There were vast numbers of people who needed his message.

“So he continued the journey. And in early June he arrived in Sedbergh, south-east of the Lake District. He lodged with a man we only know as Captain Ward, who was very taken with him – he said he felt George’s eyes were piercing through him.

“And on Sunday morning the captain took him to a nearby chapel – it was called Firbank Chapel – and George’s presence there attracted a lot of local interest. People had heard of him, he had a reputation, and when he just turned up out of the blue it caused a stir.

“There were two preachers in the chapel that day, it was packed, and so George joined the overflow outside. And word of mouth and local bush telegraph brought more and more people along, and after the service it was clear that everyone wanted George to speak. They’d heard about him, they wanted to hear him.

“By early afternoon there were about a thousand people outside the chapel, on a hill nearby called Firbank Fell, and they were all eager to hear from him. It was clear to George that this was a massive opportunity.

“And he rose to the challenge. He was twenty-eight, with around ten years’ experience as a speaker and agitator, he’d honed and developed his message – and that afternoon it all came pouring out in one continuous, unbroken stream. He spoke for three hours without a break. Three hours in which he hammered home everything he had been thinking, contemplating and praying about over the previous ten years. It was a triumph. People were still talking about it weeks later. I’m still talking about it now!

“And that day George Fox’s new movement began. They were called the Quakers, and they began – the Quakers really began – on Firbank Fell in 1652.

“As far as I can tell there are no records of exactly what he said that day, but we do have a report of a meeting about a week later in a village called Preston Patrick, a few miles south of the Lake District. There was a boy there called Thomas Camm. He was twelve. And this is what he wrote later.

A notable day never to be forgotten by me, a day in which my soul was effectually opened, reached and convinced, along with many more.

“And here’s a statistic that astonishes me. By 1680, thirty-odd years later, those ‘many more’ had grown to 66,000. 66,000 Quakers in Britain – that was about one in a hundred of the population. George’s vision on Pendle Hill had come true.”