No More Quaker Heroes - or Villains

  A Book of Quaker Saints by Lucy V. Hodgkin

 

 illustrated by F. Cayley-Robinson

A Yearly Meeting preparation session on 'Uncomfortable Quaker Histories' which I attended on Zoom yesterday allowed me to revisit work I have done myself on challenging Quaker myths and legends and got me thinking about how to take this forward.

We were presented with stories of Quakers in Lancaster and in America (including William Penn) who had been profitably engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and who had not always been challenged effectively by their contemporaries. We were also reminded of the ambivalent attitude of some Friends in the past to the poor - only to be helped if they were suitably grateful and knew 'their place' and never wholly accepted as equals. In this context we were asked if a testimony to equality had ever existed.

Back in the 1980s I gave a series of talks on Quaker Myths and Legends, questioning assumptions that were taken for granted at the time such as equality between men and women and how the peace testimony came about. In 1986 I was part of the group who wrote and presented the Quaker Womens Group Swarthmore lecture 'Bringing the Invisible into the Light'. As well as questioning whether equality had always been an integral part of the Society of Friends, the lecture included examples of painful personal experience such as domestic violence among Friends. The lecture was welcomed by many but also provoked very strong negative reactions - disbelief that Quakers could act in this way and denial that Friends were not always perfect in their relations with others. A lot of the discomfort stemmed from our audacity in challenging some Friends' established world view.

We are now looking at our past again through the lens of sexism, racism and classism and what we are finding is uncomfortable. I would say that this is what an honest study of the past should be. There never were Quaker Saints. Quakers have always been humans with human imperfections, shaped by the wider society they found themselves in but also by changes in the practices and attitudes of the Society of Friends through the centuries. I think it is better and more helpful to identify with past Quakers who were not perfect than to put heroes and heroines on a pedestal from which they may come crashing down. We may feel shame at the actions of Friends in the past and seek in some way to make amends but I believe that we should also try to reach for understanding, to learn where we are going wrong now and how we may change and improve.

We may remove the name of William Penn from a room in Friends House but I hope we can continue to give him his due and not reject him totally as a Quaker villain. We should not reject his writings because of some aspects of his life because his words are still valuable. When my meeting was reading through Quaker Faith and Practice several years ago as part of the revision process I was surprised to find that the extracts Friends found most helpful were not the most modern writings but those by William Penn and Isaac Penington. 

We need meticulous research, such as we were presented with in the preparation session, looking in detail at Quaker links to slavery, attitudes to the poor and other marginalised groups. The more we learn the more we can understand rather than only condemn. Local studies are a good start but these themes also need to be seen in a wider context - for example the way in which womens' meetings evolved, their purpose and their influence.

I have tried in my biographical posts on this blog to include a broad range of past Quakers, including women of course but also lower class Quakers without much money. There are also 'difficult' Friends and those with mental health problems. Just a few examples are Ruth Follows, Thomas Shillitoe, Benjamin Lay and his wife Sarah, Josiah Langdale and Rebecca Jones. James Jenkins was trying to write honest rather than idealised testimonies to Friends he had known in the 18th century, There is much more work to be done to bring invisible poor Quakers, Quaker servants and Quaker people of colour into the light, but a start has been made.

If there is one lesson we can learn from the past it is that there should be no more Quaker Saints. We must do away with Quaker heroes but I hope we will not go to the other extreme and cast Friends as villains. Idealising the past makes us unable to face reality but so does seeing it only in black and white rather than in Quaker gray.
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Lydia Rawlinson Lancaster

It is getting on for ten years ago that I started writing on this blog about Quakers in the past. I kept myself going with several Quaker alphabets and now I am continuing with this occasional series. I began with Grace Hall Chamber and I shall continue with one of her friends, Lydia Rawlinson Lancaster.

Lydia was born in 1683 at Graithwaite in Lancashire, near Lake Windermere, the seventh of the eight children of Thomas Rawlinson and his wife Dorothy, born Hutton. Brought up in a Quaker family, Lydia describes herself as one drawn to thoughts of God from infancy. Her father died when she was six and around this time she remembered being moved to floods of tears by the ministry of a visiting Friend. From the age of fourteen Lydia struggled with the conviction that she was being called to be a minister herself. She resisted this calling for ten years - a period which her contemporaries saw approvingly as a time when she grew in wisdom and experience but which she remembered as a 'long howling wilderness' of unfaithfulness.

Soon after the beginning of her ministry, in 1708, Lydia began to travel, at first to local meetings and then in 1710 as far as London. In 1712 she went to Ireland, in 1717 to Scotland and from 1718 to 1719 she visited America in the company of her brother Abraham’s wife, Elizabeth Beck Rawlinson (1670-1750). Lydia’s travels, although undertaken under a sense of religious duty, were however, as she says herself, '...sometimes pretty trying, not having such care taken at home in my absence as might have been desired.^' She had married, in January 1707, Bryan Lancaster, a tanner of Kendal, when she was 23 and he was 20. There were no children of the marriage and there are hints in contemporary records of sorrows and affliction, some of it possibly financial, brought upon Lydia by her 'nearest temporal connexion', her husband.

In 1729 Lydia moved with her aged mother to Colthouse, near Hawkshead, a small rural settlement next to a Quaker Meeting House, but there is no mention of her husband on the removal certificate. Her mother died in 1737 aged 93 and by 1743 Lydia was evidently living at Colthouse with her husband. Bryan Lancaster died in 1747 aged 60.

Lydia’s ministry was generally acknowledged to be expressive and powerful, but her experience gave her another dimension for, as was said by her fellow Quakers, 'being instructed in sorrow she was favoured with a sympathizing heart and knew how to partake in the affliction of others'.

Throughout her ministry Lydia was a staunch supporter of  Quaker Womens Meetings for business at a local level. In 1746 she also put her name to a petition aimed at extending them to a national level, although this was not accepted and the Womens Yearly Meeting was not set up until 1784. Lydia was not concerned with the equality of women as such but wanted them to be encouraged to take up their religious duties as much as the men were. In her local meetings Lydia, drawing on her own experience, was both stern and encouraging 'particularly to the timorous and backward'. She was remembered for always bidding farewell to those women who made the effort to come to womens meetings with a sort of blessing, and she continued to attend  meetings herself right up to her last days.

At the end of her life Lydia lived in Lancaster, free from financial worries and, she says in a letter to her friend James Wilson, 'mostly alone, for that is what I most delight in and have done most of my time'. She still travelled in the ministry, taking long journeys in 1749 and 1754. In 1760 she and Grace Chamber, at the end of both their lives but 'green in old age', travelled together to Welsh Yearly Meeting, Bath, Bristol and London.

Lydia died in 1761 at the age of 78 at Lancaster and was buried in the Friends burial ground there. Lydia published nothing in her lifetime but her influence continued. Many years after her death, in 1840, her descendant and namesake, Lydia Ann Barclay, edited and published a selection of extracts from her letters, feeling that they might be of use to future generations.

 

Quaker Alphabet Blog 2015-2017 - Y for Yearly Meeting Gathering

Back in 2013 I wrote a post about my experience of Yearly Meeting and as I said then I have been a regular attender for many years.

London (later Britain) Yearly Meeting has usually been held in London but in modern times there have been moves to change this. In 1905 London Yearly Meeting was held in Leeds and there were other occasional forays out of the capital - to Birmingham in 1908, Manchester in 1912 and 1926, Llandrindod Wells in 1924, Scarborough in 1925, Bristol in 1937, York in 1941 and 1942 and Edinburgh in 1948.

Younger son at YM 1986

It was intended that Yearly Meeting should be held in the summer every four years outside London and a minute was made to that effect in 1945. However the organisation of these 'Residential Yearly Meetings' took a while and the first was not held until 1986 in Exeter. I was there as part of the Quaker Women's Group presenting the Swarthmore Lecture and my family came too. In fact the children enjoyed themselves so much that they insisted that we should make it a family tradition. So we continued to go not only to Yearly Meetings in London but to residentials in Aberdeen in 1989, in Warwick in 1993, in Aberystwyth in 1997, in Exeter in 2001 and in York in 2005.

Author and younger son at Aberdeen YM 1989

From 1991 it was decided to hold Summer Gatherings between Residential Yearly Meetings. These were to be predominantly social affairs with no decision-making agenda. The Yearly Meeting in these years was still held in May in London. We did not go to the first Summer Gathering in Bradford but did attend those held in Lancaster in 1995, Canterbury in 1999, Loughborough in 2003 and Stirling in 2007.

Eventually however the organisational and financial burden of these different gatherings became too much, especially in the years when both Yearly Meeting and Summer Gathering were held. The decision was therefore made to amalgamate Residential Yearly Meeting and Summer Gathering into Yearly Meeting Gathering with YM sessions and social activities being thrown together and particpants being able to make their own agenda.

Epilogue at Yearly Meeting Gathering in Bath 2014

The first Yearly Meeting Gathering was held in York in 2009, followed by Canterbury in 2011 and Bath in 2014. This year YMG will be at the University of Warwick and I will be there.

Any longer residential gathering is bound to be an intense experience, sometimes almost overwhelming, and I have sometimes found it difficult, needing to carve out spaces of solitude and calm for myself. But there have been many happy and uplifting times as well as difficult ones and I have always been glad that I have gone.