A short History of Quakers in Leicestershire

 

A short History of Quakers in Leicestershire

 

By Malcolm Elliott

 

It all began here in Leicestershire with the birth of George Fox in the village of Fenny Drayton or Drayton-in-the-Clays, in 1624. The 18^th century historian, John Nichols, states that George went to school in Billesdon, but there is no other evidence for this. He was apprenticed to a shoe maker in the nearby village of Mancetter, where he also learned about dealing in wool and cattle raising. His father was a weaver, who was a churchwarden in Fenny Drayton, and evidently a man of some means, for, when he was nineteen, George began his spiritual quest, riding around the country on horseback, and he never seems to have lacked money. It was a time of religious ferment, when the Church of England founded by Henry the Eighth, was being pulled apart by puritans on the one hand and high churchmen on the other.     

 George was a serious young man whose earnest theological discussions with the local parish priest left him unsatisfied, so he set out to find answers from other learned men, but the truth eluded him, until one day he felt a voice within him saying that he had no need of priests or other men’s words to bring enlightenment. It was during a time of deep despair that he claimed to have heard a voice within him saying: ‘There is one even Christ Jesus who can speak to thy condition’. This conviction, that God is within us, ready to communicate directly, without the need for any intermediary that inspired him to take his message to the world.

 

Fox’s message

 Fox’s Journal was not published till he was an old man, dictated during one of his many periods in prison, so it contains very little reference to the momentous events that occurred during his lifetime. The Civil War between King Charles I and parliament began in 1640 and came to an end soon after the execution of Charles in 1649. Without the king, the established church had no official head, and many different sects came into existence during Cromwell’s commonwealth. Quakers became, for a while, the most numerous of all these. What was it that led so many to respond to Fox’s call? He was undoubtedly a man of personal magnetism, with a strong constitution and a voice that carried when addressing huge crowds in the open air. There was a great hunger for religious truth at the time and groups like the seekers were accustomed to meet in silent prayer and contemplation.  Many of Fox’s early disciples came from these seekers in Yorkshire and Cumbria, though he was adamant that ‘The truth first sprang up in Leicestershire’.

Fox set out on his journeying in 1644, in the midland counties of Nottingham, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, but he does not seem to have had his ‘moment of truth’ till sometime in 1647, and it was not until his later journeying, in 1652, that the Quaker movement really took off. Fox gave his hearers the confidence and assurance that they already had direct access to the truth. Silent worship together brought a stillness and clarity of vision in which they were convinced that they were in the presence of God. In the words of Jesus, ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’. It was this sense of communion and awareness of ‘the presence in the midst’ that became the defining mark of Quakerism.  

 

Persecution

Since Quakers refused to acknowledge the need for priests and would not defer to their social superiors, they inevitably came into conflict with authority and were frequently imprisoned for refusing to show respect by doffing their hats. Taking one’s hat off was a sign of deference but Quakers insisted on the equality of all men and women. one of George’s first brushes with the Anglican Church was when he spoke up during a service in Leicester, defending the right of women to have their say in equality with men. John Boyer of Leicester was punished ‘for no other cause that he knew of, but that he did not pull off his hat to the Earl of Gray’ and was ‘beaten by one of his servants with a great cudgel about the head till he was very bloody, and then struck down among the willows into the water, and there left for dead.’

 A petition of 1684 spoke of 1460 Quakers in gaol and 37 of them in Leicestershire. They kept careful records of all their ‘sufferings’ in order to petition the government against such harsh measures, but such persecution also gained greater numbers of converts. Several instances of   the persecution of Friends under the Quaker Act of 1662, which forbade the holding of unauthorised meetings, are recounted in ‘The Collection of Sufferings of the People called Quakers’ published in 1753. At Long Clawson in the Vale of Belvoir, four Friends were sent to prison and their goods distrained so that ‘they had not a cow left to give the young children milk’. Not only were they fined, but ‘they cruelly dragged some women in the streets by the necks, till they were near stifled, tearing the clothes off their necks and backs. one woman was so severely beaten that gave suck was so beaten and bruised on her breast, that it festered and broke, with which she hath endured many weeks misery…’ Between 1661 and 1697 no less than 13,562 Quakers were imprisoned, and of these 338 died in prison or from their wounds.

Fox, himself, was imprisoned in several places, including Leicester, where he tells us in his journal, that the Quakers held meetings for worship in the prison yard. on one occasion when he was arrested in Derby, he admonished the judge to ‘quake at the power of the Lord’. The word ‘Quaker’ may have derived from this incident or it may simply refer to the habit of some early worshippers to ‘quake’ or tremble during their meetings. Originally, Quakers called themselves ‘Friends of Truth’ and our official name is still ‘The Religious Society of Friends’, but from a very early date, the name by which we were most widely recognised was ‘Quakers’.

 

Leicestershire

We know that there were over a dozen places in Leicestershire where Quaker meetings were held at the end of the 17^th century. Most of these died out during the next 50 years, when the fervour of religious debate declined with toleration and a general lack of interest in matters of faith. When religious revival came with Methodism, in the 1740s, Quakerism no longer had a mass following and the movement became a rather inward-looking, quietist body. It is sometimes assumed that Quakerism was a faith confined to the towns, but we have clear evidence that this was not so in the first hundred years in Leicestershire. There were small groups of Quakers in the Vale of Belvoir, at Swannington, Castle Donnington and at Somerby apart from the urban centres such as Hinckley.

The Quaker historian, John Punshon, points out the importance of the general meeting at Swannington, in December 1654, when several important developments took place in the organisation of the Society. This meeting is referred to by Fox (page 182 of the Journal in the edition edited by John Nickalls). There are no actual minutes of what occurred, but it is probable that the early discipline of the Society took shape at this meeting.  The regional organisation of meetings seems to have evolved in the following year. So too did the procedures for disciplining Friends and the methods used in publishing Quaker literature. It is also probable that matters of faith were on the agenda, as Quaker literature published in the year after Swannington is less diverse than in earlier years.  Friends were a little sensitive to the use of the word ‘Quaker’ at the time, and attempts were made at Swannington to adopt the phrase ‘children of the light’ instead. It was a suggestion that would hardly have met with approval in our own day.

It is conceivable that without the structural changes set up at Swannington, the Society would not have survived at all. Many other groups were persecuted out of existence or just wilted away in the more worldly atmosphere of the Restoration. The fact that Quakers were linked in an organisational structure, keeping in close touch with one another and recording their activity in minute books, helped to keep the Society alive in the succeeding decades.

 

The Oakham Manuscript

Our knowledge of how these early groups of Quakers actually thought and operated is illustrated most intimately in the minute book of the meeting based on Oakham, dating from 1675 to 1754. This precious volume was purchased by the local Record Office with some help from Leicester Meeting in about 1965. It shows how these farming folk tried to remain true to their professed beliefs by keeping themselves apart from worldly temptations and by demanding high moral standards in their own community. Lydia Robinson was reprimanded for mixing water with her milk and many were disowned for ‘marrying out’, that is to non-Quakers. The very first page of the minute book tells of their efforts to exert discipline on their members. Abigail Harrow was visited by three Friends for ‘general misdemeanours and disorderly walking in ye truth’. The same meeting went on to declare its opposition to the payment of money for the repair of ‘ye bells in ye steeple houses or any other levy belonging to that place’. This foreshadowed the numerous fines levied over the next 200 years for non-payment of church tithes. Even as early as 1734, Quakers were lamenting the amount of paperwork emanating from their headquarters. A meeting of Oakham Friends in  November that year urged ‘or correspondent at London, that he acquaint the Meeting for Sufferings to forbear sending Books to this Monthly Meeting till it require them.’

 

Quakers in 19^th Century Leicester

By the end of the 18^th century, there were only three meetings in the county, at Leicester, Loughborough and Hinckley, and by the mid 19^th century Leicester had become the only one to survive. Its membership depended heavily on two wealthy and influential families, the Ellises and the Burgesses.  There is a book in our library by Isabella Ellis that gives fascinating insight into the lives of these two prosperous Quaker families, (Records of 19^th Century Leicester, I.C.Ellis, 1935). I am indebted to the Quaker historian, John Punshon, for drawing my attention to the importance of the meeting at Swannington.

In 1824, out of a total membership of 84, 24 were from the Ellis family and 24 belonged to that of the Burgesses. At that time John Ellis lived and farmed at Beaumont Leys and Thomas Burgess lived with his family at Wigston Grange. By 1846 Burgess had moved to Brookfield on London Road, which became the Charles Frears School of Nursing. It was here that his son, the architect Edward Burgess, was born a year later. John Ellis was influential in the development of the Leicester and Swannington railway which opened in 1832. He became the first chairman of the Midland Railway when that was formed in 1846. He was also an M.P. for Leicester. In 1845, he moved from the home farm at Beaumont Leys to Belgrave Hall, which is now the museum. His son, Edward Shipley Ellis, whose house stood where the Hawthorne building of De Montfort University now stands, also became chairman of the Midland Railway and was prominent in many other aspects of life in Leicester. His son died at the age of 21 while conducting chemical experiments in a shed in the garden. The Ellis memorial wing of the Wyggeston Boys School, now the Cathedral extension, still bears the inscription to his memory.

Although Quakers were not allowed to become members of parliament till 1836, they had been politically active during the period of so-called ‘quietism’. They were at the forefront of opposition to slavery and one Leicester Quaker, Elizabeth Heyrick, in particular, campaigned vigorously, urging women to boycott ‘slave grown sugar’ and calling for the immediate abolition of slavery, in contrast to the gradualism advocated by the male-dominated Anti Slavery Society. (See Shirley Aucott’s ‘Women of Courage,Vision and Talent,’ 2008, for a detailed account of this remarkable woman’s life.

The Methodist revival had the effect of  dividing opinion in the Society, as in the wider Christian fold, between those who embraced its salvationist theology and the more traditional Friends who put their faith primarily in the inner light. The evangelistic creed led to several deep divisions in the Society during the 19^th century, though Leicester seems to have been largely immune to such disputes. The ideas of Darwin caused more anxiety in other denominations than among Friends, who were advised ‘to welcome light from whatever quarter it may come’. Worldliness was a more insidious danger and Leicester meeting recorded several defections to the Church of England in the last decades of the century. It is probable too, that some Quakers were troubled by conflicting loyalties during the South African War. Division of opinion was even more apparent during the Great War (1914-18) when many young men enlisted while others refused to fight. Their dilemma was unavoidable with the advent of conscription in 1916, and while some Leicester men answered the call of patriotism others opted to go to prison. one of the Ellis family, Edith Ellis, became Secretary to the Friends Service Council in 1916, when her male predecessor was imprisoned, and she herself served a three month sentence in custody for her part in publishing a pamphlet entitled ‘A Challenge to Militarism’. Another Ellis, Oliver, the elder brother of Colin Ellis, the historian, died in a flying accident in 1917.

 

Quakers in the 20^th century

The little meeting house purchased by Friends in Oakham in 1719 remains the building where Quakers worship today, though considerable improvements have been made to the interior. No other meeting houses survived in use during the 20^th century. Loughborough Friends met in rented property at John Storer House and other local groups met in private houses such as at Countesthorpe and Kibworth. They acquired their own premises in 1909, through the generosity of several Friends based at Bournville, and it was the architect of Bournville, H. Bedford Tyler, who designed the new Meeting House. However, Rugby Friends felt rather remote from their fellow Quakers in Warwickshire and so decided to become part of Leicester Monthly Meeting (the old name for Area Quaker Meeting) for the latter half of the 20^th century.

Friends in Leicester  found their original building, erected in 1680 in Soar Lane, increasingly inadequate by the mid 19^th century and a new meeting house was put up, to the design of Edward Burgess, in Prebend Street in 1876. This in turn became unsuited to modern requirements and was sold in 1955. The present building was built in Queens Road, on land provided by Charles Goddard, head of the silver polish firm, who was a member of the meeting and our magnificent garden was doubled in size through the generosity of Paul and Catherine Hickinbotham.

The Meeting House was extended, in 1968, to include the library and activity rooms and, a few years later, the Leicester Quaker Housing Association built Drayton House, designed by Douglas Smith, on part of the property facing Queens Road. At the same time about half of the garden was laid out as an area for the parking of cars. Additional accommodation for the elderly was later built on Princess Road, behind New Walk museum, named John Woolman House and at George Hythe House on the Beaumont Leys estate. George had long been active in promoting schemes for housing the elderly and had been working on plans for the premises at Beaumont Leys when he suffered a heart attack. The problem of what to call the new building was solved! Concern for the elderly is by no means the only social activity to interest present-day Quakers and groups reflecting other Quaker concerns, such as the Green Living group and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, meet at the Meeting House together with well over a hundred other user-groups during the course of a year.

One of the advantages of the Queens Road site is that it offers a pleasant environment in which so many non-Quaker organisations can meet. The rents they pay for hiring rooms enable us to pay for the upkeep of the property, and in recent years several major improvements have been made, such as the installation of a stair-lift and of other facilities for the disabled. We have also been able to improve insulation and upgrade our heating system. Above all we have had the means to employ wardens and, more recently, resident Friends together with a manager and assistant manager to see to much of the business concerned with the running of the meeting house. Our first resident warden was Doreen Chamberlain, whose daughter Daphne now belongs to Oakham Meeting. Some years later we had two couples who had previously worked in Southern Africa, Stanley and Margaret Moore and Barbara and Kendall Clark. Barbara’s flare for writing led her to produce a little book for younger readers entitled ‘Never a Dull Day’. It gives a vivid impression of the sort of experiences encountered by the Friends we ask to serve at the heart of our Quaker community.