Quaker Alphabet Blog 2015 - L for Josiah Langdale

Josiah Langdale was born in 1673 at Nafferton in Yorkshire and baptised into the Church of England in August of that year. In 1681 Josiah's father died and, as the eldest and possibly only son, Josiah had to give up his full time education in order to support his family.

He went to work on a farm, caring for livestock and learning how to plough, work which was obviously congenial to his nature. He was proud of his skill and found the solitary nature of the work conducive to religious contemplation. This contemplation was usually about the state of his own soul. In the spiritual autobiograhy which Josiah wrote later in life he confesses his failings and temptations, among them the troubling feelings aroused in him by a violent game of football and by his enjoyment of dancing. He longed to be a better person but found that outward ceremonies, such as confirmation by the bishop and receiving the Lord's Supper, did not have the immediate, amost magical, transforming effect he hoped for.

The second great change in Josiah's life happened in 1688 when he was fifteen and his mother, after seven years as a widow, decided to marry again. She would no longer be dependent on her son and Josiah felt that it was time to leave home. He hired himself out to a farmer as a ploughman, probably at one of the hiring fairs which were held each year throughout the country at this time. Martinmas, November 11th, was the usual date in the north when master and man would mutually agree on a verbal contract which bound them for a year.

Nafferton Church

Josiah was happy with his first master but when the year ended could not agree on wages so decided to hire himself instead to a Quaker, David Milner, who, with his wife Sarah and their family lived at Carnaby, a village a few miles from Nafferton. Josiah's family and his local priest were very worried that these Quakers might influence or even bewitch him into becoming one of them, but as it turned out the greatest influence on him initially was not Quakerism but another servant of the Milners. Thomas Hewson, a blind thresher about fifteen years older than Josiah, was a self-educated man who had thought deeply about religion but had retained his independence. In him Josiah found an intimate friend and confidant with whom he could explore all his doubts and fears about what was the right way in religion.

It was mainly in order to stay with his friend that Josiah hired himself to David Milner for another year in 1690. When he went home for a visit during the winter of 1690-91 Josiah's relations teased him that he seemed so serious that he was in danger of turning Quaker, but Josiah was only made uncomfortable by such remarks and hurried back to his friend Thomas.

In fact the Milners had been extremely careful not to exert any influence on Josiah or indeed to talk to him about religion at all. Only when Sarah Milner's brother, Timothy Towse, an impetuous young man of twenty five, came for a visit in 1691 and urged Josiah to go to a meeting to hear the well known travelling minister James Dickinson was any pressure put on him. The whole episode was altogether counter-productive too as even though his friend Thomas Hewson went with him and approved of James Dickinson, Josiah was so anxious about the effect the Quaker might have on him that he could derive no benefit from it.

Map showing Nafferton, Carnaby and Bridlington

Josiah went on with his spiritual searching, quietly observing and approving the behaviour of the Quakers he
encountered at the fairs and markets he attended as his master's foreman, but it was not until two years later, in May 1693 when he was nineteen, that the greatest change in his life came about. One Sunday David Milner had gone into Bridlington early and later in the day Josiah's mistress Sarah asked him if he would escort her into town and come with her to meeting if he felt he could. This time he was content to go and after sitting in silence for several hours he was moved to tears. He was not derided, as he had been a few years before when the same thing had happened during a church service, but accepted. He knew that he had found what he had been seeking - the people of God with whom he could join.

In a closeknit rural society the change in Josiah did not remain a secret. His mother was told of it and came at once to see for herself. When he met her Josiah felt that he had to be true to his new profession and act on the testimony to plain speech which would mark him out as a Quaker. He therefore addressed her as 'thou', without any of the respectful forms which she would have expected from her son. She was offended and went home, but six weeks later Josiah felt that he should visit his family to try to heal the breach. This time he was better received by his mother and step-father and also by his uncle and aunts. Josiah might have changed his behaviour but they accepted that he was their Josiah still.

Bridlington harbour

When Josiah reached the age of twenty in 1693 the land left to him by his father came into his possession. He was able to be more independent and although still earning his keep as a ploughman could give more of his time to Quaker work. When Josiah became a member of Bridlington meeting (then called Burlington and Keys) it was in the middle of a revival, particularly among the young people. Another Bridlington Quaker, John Richardson, said of it 'Friends grew so in the ministry that it became a proverb that Bridlington was become a school of prophets'. Josiah grew close to other young men such as Timothy Towse, of whom he had initially been so wary, and Thomas Thompson, with whom he later travelled in the ministry.

Josiah felt called to the ministry within a year of his convincment and felt that one day he might be called to visit America. Eventually in 1700, when he was twenty-seven, he fufilled this calling, travelling mainly with Thomas Thompson and remaining abroad for nearly five years. The two young men gave a report of their journey to Yearly Meeting in London in 1705.

About five years later Josiah married Margaret Burton when he was 37 and she was 26. They lived in Bridlington and were both active as ministers, travelling independently when called to do so. In 1715 Josiah travelled to America again with Thomas Thompson. This was a much shorter visit than the first and the pair were sent off by Friends meeting in Philadelphia in June 1716 to return homr by way of the West Indies, which they did in a leisurely fashion, not arriving back until later in the year. While Joseph was away Margaret Langdale had undertaken a religious visit on her own account to Ireland and continued her travels after his return, visiting Europe in 1717 and Wales in 1718.

Josiah, meanwhile, was feeling more and more drawn to move permanently to America. He went again in 1720 and stayed for a year mainly in Philadelphia where he is reported as diligently attending religious meetings. This time though he had not come primarily as a minister and spent most of his time buying land and making arrangements to move his family and himself to the New World. Early in 1723 Josiah, Margaret and their two surviving children, Mary aged ten and John aged eight, set sail for America on the ship London Hope but during the voyage Josiah died at the age of 49.

Margaret had no choice but to contiue on the course they had set themselves. She and her children were welcomed by Philadelphia Friends and she at once embarked on her work as a minister but she could not continue to rely on the charity of Friends so resolved her problems by marrying again. After the accepted mourning period of a year and a day Margaret married Samuel Preston, a useful citizen of Philadelphia and a valuable Friend twenty years her senior. Thomas Chalkley, one of Josiah's old travelling companions was present and reported that  'The meeting was large, and the parable of the virgins and the bridegroom's coming at midnight, was opened'.

In the years that followed Margaret was much occupied as a travelling minister until she died in 1742 aged 58. Her son and daughter both married and settled in America and there are Langdale descendants living there to this day.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 23 - L for Benjamin Lay

Benjamin Lay in America

Benjamin Lay was born in Colchester in Essex in 1683 to poor Quaker parents. There was no money for education and Benjamin was apprenticed to a glove maker but before he was eighteen he went to work on his brother's farm. When he came of age Benjamin decided to become a sailor, a surprising choice given his physical difficulties. He was only four feet seven inches (1.40 m) tall and was a hunchback, with a projecting chest and legs so slender that they seemed hardly able to bear his weight. However for the next seven years he went to sea and visited many parts of the world. He returned to England in 1710, moved to London and in 1718 married Sarah Smith of Deptford.

Benjamin was troublesome to Friends in London because of his practice of interrupting any ministry which he felt went beyond the guidance of God and used the minister's own words. When remonstrated with he said that he would prefer not to disturb meetings but had to be true to his own discernment. Eventually he was disowned in 1720. Benjamin took his wife back to Colchester and opened a shop, but he continued to disturb meetings and also other denominations' services. As he was already disowned Colchester Friends could do little but issued a public condemnation of him in 1723. Eventually Benjamin and Sarah left England for America in 1731.

They went first to Barbados where Benjamin obtained land and built a cottage. It was here that an incident occurred which made a great impression on Benjamin and which also illustrates the extremes of his character. One day Benjamin was furious to discover that a wild hog had got into his newly planted garden and uprooted everything. He killed the hog but then went further, dismembering it and nailing the pieces to his gate. Later, when his temper cooled, he was so stricken with remorse that he vowed never again to eat food or wear clothes that involved the death of any animal. He became a vegetarian and refused to wear leather.

John Woolman

Benjamin was horrified by the treatment of slaves in the island and his choice of food and clothing was further restricted by his refusal to use anything that was the product of slave labour. He grew flax and made his own clothes, refusing to wear cotton or to use indigo to dye cloth as both were produced by slaves. This practice was later followed by other Friends including John Woolman who were called 'White Quakers' because of their appearance. Benjamin spoke out against the slave owners and made himself so unpopular that he was soon on the move again, this time to Philadelphia. He had thought to escpe from slave owners there but was disappointed to find the practice widespread even among Friends. Benjamin built a house in the country where he grew vegetables and kept bees and devoted himself to campaigning against slavery and for other causes such as temperance and penal reform. As Benjamin's wife was in poor health the couple moved from their own house to stay with a Friend living near Abington Meeting. Here Benjamin built a 'grotto' in which he kept his library. Sarah died in 1735 but Benjamin continued his campaigning although his direct, dramatic methods made him very unpopular among Friends.

In 1738 during a Yearly Meeting session in Burlington, New Jersey, Benjamin entered dressed in a long white overcoat with a large book under his arm. He exclaimed against the hypocrisy of Quaker slave owners saying that they 'might as well throw off the plain coat as I do.' At this he took off his overcoat and revealed himself dressed in a bright military coat with a sword at his side. Saying that owning a slave was like thrusting a sword through his heart, 'as I do this book', Benjamin drew his weapon and plunged it into the book, piercing a bladder full of red poke-berry juice which he had concealed within its hollowed-out centre. People next to him were splashed with the scarlet liquid and several women fainted.

This disturbance proved the last straw for Philadelphia Friends. They had already been offended in the previous year by Benjamin's publication, without going through the proper channels to gain the Yearly Meeting's approval, of his book All Slave-Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates... The book, printed by Benjamin's friend and namesake Benjamin Franklin, made many accusations against individual Friends and the Society as a whole for being complicit in the slave system. The Yearly Meeting was so displeased that they put advertisements in various newspapers distancing themselves from Benjamin's book and his views. In 1738 they went a step further and formally disowned him, claiming that he had never truly been a Friend and that he had obtained a travelling minute from Colchester under irregular circumstances.

Benjamin Franklin

Of course Benjamin took no notice and continued to consider himself a Quaker, He also continued to make dramatic gestures. Once he stood outside a meeting house in the snow without a coat and in bare feet to remind Friends of the hardship experienced by slaves. Eventually his campaigning, together with the more moderate stand taken by John Woolman and Benjamin Franklin among others, had an effect and the tide of public opinion turned against slavery. Not long before he died Pennsylvania decided to disown slave-holding Quakers. When Benjamin heard the news he rose from his chair and gave thanks to God adding, 'I can now die in peace.'

Eccentric to the last Benjamin wanted to be cremated and offered a friend £100 if he would burn his body and throw the ashes into the sea. But his friend refused, recoiling in horror at such an unheard-of request. So when he died, on 3 April 1759 at the age of seventy-six, Benjamin Lay was buried at Abington, Pennsylvania. Today we may associate the struggle against slavery with the name of Woolman rather than Lay but Benjamin's legacy continued to inspire the movement for generations and throughout the first half of the 19th century it was common for abolitionist Quakers to keep pictures of him in their homes.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 20 - J for Rebecca Jones

Sampler worked by Rebecca Jones

Rebecca Jones was born in Philadelphia in 1739 and remained attached to that city and to the welfare of its people all her life. Her father William Jones was a sailor and was lost at sea when Rebecca was a young child. Her mother Mary, left with the sole care of Rebecca and her elder brother Daniel, supported the family by setting up a school. Rebecca later praised her hard work which 'brought us up reputably, gave us sufficient learning and educated us in the way of the Church of England.' Mary wanted to pass the school on to her daughter and to that end educated her not only in book-learning but in other 'accomplishments' such as music, dancing and needlework. Rebecca studied needlework with Anne Marsh, a celebrated Philadelphia needlewoman, and one of Rebecca's beautifully worked samplers from this time survives in the Philadelphia Atwater Kent Museum.

Rebecca seemed to be following the path which her careful mother had set out for her but she had an independent, restless side to her which brought her into conflict with her family. Before she was twelve she got her mother's permission to go to Quaker meetings with the children of neighbours who were Friends and she kept going, not really knowing why, even when her mother began to be uneasy. Soon she was attending meeting without her mother's knowledge, sitting at the back near the door where she could come and go unnoticed.

Catherine Payton

Rebecca was in spiritual turmoil and had no-one to confide in until in 1754 when she was fifteen Catherine Payton (later Phillips) was visiting America from England as a travelling minister and came to Philadelphia. Rebecca was very struck by Catherine and her ministry and got up enough courage to write all her spiritual turmoil down in a letter, which she could not bring herself to sign, and slip it into Catherine's hand as she was going into meeting. Catherine asked the Friends she was staying with who this young woman might be and Daniel Trotter, a near neighbour of the Jones family said, 'I do not know who it can be without it's that wild Becky Jones, who has got to coming to meeting and sits by black Rose', for Rebecca unknowingly sat on the back benches usually reserved for African Americans.

Catherine wrote a reply full of encouragement and became a kind of mentor to Rebecca, continuing their correspondence when she returned to England. Rebecca was set on her path towards Quakerism but this also set her against her mother. Rebecca now felt that she could no longer continue to study or teach to others 'the lighter and merely ornamental branches' of learning and her mother, seeing the ruin of her hopes, tried to stop her attending meetings by any means she could. Rebecca stayed true to her calling and eventually, at the age of nineteen, was recognised as a minister by Philadelphia Friends. This acknowledgement of her daughter's gifts and the kindness and tact with which Friends treated both mother and daughter reconciled Mary Jones to Rebecca's choice. Rebecca did teach in her mother's school and took it over on Mary's death in 1761, together with her friend and fellow Quaker Hannah Cathrall. The school thrived and taught all branches of learning including practical, rather than ornamental needlework.

Silhouettes of Hannah Cathrall and Rebecca Jones

Rebecca became one of the pillars of Philadelphia Quakers. She was particularly assiduous in helping the poor, having known hardship herself and having to rely on her own efforts for her livelihood. She was a devoted friend of John Woolman and supported his campaigning against slavery. She might have remained in Philadelphia but in 1784 she gave up her school and laid before her monthly meeting a long-considered calling to visit Friends in England. She was given a certificate and set out on a journey which would take her four years. During this time, with a variety of women companions, her memorandum book reveals that she travelled thousands of miles in the UK and Ireland and attended hundreds of meetings of various kinds. She was particularly concerned with servants, apprentices and labourers and also spoke particularly to the young, remembering her own spiritual journey. Rebecca also managed to visit the ageing Catherine Payton Phillips and renew their loving acquaintance in person.

In 1788, under a sense of 'fresh and sure direction' Rebecca returned to Philadelphia. Having given up her school and with her eyesight deteriorating, she needed to find another way of earning a living and set up a

Rebecca in later life

small shop in a room of her house where she sold fabrics and haberdashery, some of it supplied by her Friends in England. In a letter of 1790 she acknowledges that the change brought some regrets, 'Thou hast doubtless heard that I have shaken my hands from the gain of school keeping – tho’ by the way I may tell thee my present gain is not so delicious, nor do I feel so every way complete as when my uncontrolled sway was love, serving my numerous tribe of various dispositions, circumstances, and ages – but as I cannot… renew my youthful sight & other requisites for the service, I endeavour after contentment in my present situation...'


In 1793 Rebecca fell ill in the yellow fever epidemic during which 4,000 Philadelphians died, but lived to resume her ministry and the wide correspondence which was a major activity of her later years. In the mid-1790s, she contributed her knowledge of Friends' education in England to the founding of Westtown  School, a boarding school which opened in the spring of 1799, patterned after the Ackworth Friends School in Yorkshire.

Over the years Rebecca retained, in her unassuming way, a certain 'queenly dignity' as well as an easy and gracious manner. and among women of her time she stood out for her intellectual capacity, quick wit, strength of character and 'sanctified common sense.'  She was a trusted counsellor and informal almoner, 'eminent for leading the cause of the poor.' Her modest home was always open to those in trouble or wishing her advice and it was said of her that she possessed 'singular penetration on discovering cases of distress and delicacy in affording relief.' 

In 1813, she suffered an attack of typhus fever and for the last five years of her life, she was confined almost entirely to her home, where she was devotedly cared for by Bernice Chattin Allinson, a young widow whom she had taken in as a daughter. Rebecca Jones died in Philadelphia in 1818 aged 78 and was buried in the Friends burial ground of  Arch Street meeting house. on the morning of the yearly meeting of ministers & elders.

Arch Street Meeting House in Philadelphia today