Quakers
The Religious Society of Friends or Quakers.
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) was one of the many dissenting groups that had its origins in the English Civil Wars. Its founder was George Fox, born in 1624 in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire, the son of a weaver. He was a deeply religious young man, who spent his youth searching for the true way to God, and began preaching an uncompromising Christianity in 1647. Fox and his followers were frequently persecuted by the authorities for their unconventional views, although Oliver Cromwell had sympathy for the Friends. Persecution continued into the 1680s, when James II then William III and Mary introduced religious toleration in England. We know a lot about the early Quakers, because they documented the histories of their communities in volumes of written testimony known as ‘Sufferings’. There are a number of entries on Wymeswold in the Leicestershire volume.
A small Quaker community probably emerged in Wymeswold in the 1650s or 1660s; the accounts of the Old Dalby Quaker association which exist from late 1667 show that Wymeswold was contributing monthly sums of between 2 shillings and 8 shillings. In 1669 a ‘conventicle of Quakers’ was reported in Wymeswold and in the same year, the Bishop of Lincoln’s Visitation records mention 'about four' Quakers. The Quakers' own records for 1671 mention the Wymeswold meeting.
The leader of the early Wymeswold Quakers was John Fox – not related to George, the founder – who owned a farm and lands in the Stockwell (today No.2). He was born in February 1636, the eldest of four sons of William Fox and Isabelle his wife, and baptised at Wymeswold Church. John Fox was a yeoman farmer who also kept the general store in the village and whose house in the Stockwell was used as the Meeting House for the Society of Friends.
In 1677, George Fox the founder of the Society came to the village. He records in his journal that after visiting Sileby, ‘I went … to John Fox's at Wymeswold in Leicestershire where I had a meeting that evening.’ The families involved were the Foxes, William and Mary Marshall, Elizabeth Shepherd, Edward Belton and William Waite. One Richard Loat, a member of the Meeting, was judged unfit due to 'Infidelity’, presumably after attending another place of worship. He would probably have been excluded from the Society. At this time, such religious meetings were illegal as the Coventicles Acts of 1664 and 1670 made the holding of dissenting meetings punishable by fines or imprisonment.
John Smith, a notorious informer, moved from Nottingham to live in Hoton in 1679. He made it his business to see out Quaker and other Dissenting meetings in order to have the participants arrested and fined, and to claim one-third of the penalty as a reward. Quakers always refused to pay these fines and so had goods distrained. In the same year, William Marshall was fined £20 for two meetings that had taken place at his house in Wymeswold and had a cow worth £2 13s 4d confiscated. It was then sold to Smith the informer for £1 6s 8d. John Fox also was fined for attending the same meeting and had goods confiscated to the value of £23 15s, his house being broken open to seize them. From Elizabeth Shepherd officers took a hog worth 10s. Fox was fined again in 1680 and upon his refusal to pay, the Justice of the Peace took away two brass pans and a bass pot.
Persecution of the Quakers continued during the 1680s. In July 1683, a meeting at the house of John Fox was raided by the informer, John Smith, a constable and the 'Headborough'. The informer came in, locked the door and took out the key to prevent the inhabitants from escaping and their friends from coming in to assist them. Later that month, Smith brought a warrant confiscate goods and chattels of John Fox to a value of £21. They were sold to Joseph Fox of Wymeswold, the proceeds being divided into thirds, one to the justice, one to the informer and one to the poor of the parish. In July 1684, another meeting at John Fox’s house was raided and goods to the value of £20 were seized by officers and taken away in two carts. Edward Belton, William White, Elizabeth Shepherd and Mary Marshall were fined for being at the same meeting.
Yet another raid took place at a quarterly meeting held on 28 September 1684, when Mary Wood, Elizabeth Wall, and John Penfold were fined. To pay off fines the officers also took the benches and a bedstead out of the Meeting House, and Mary Wood’s bedding, bedstead, and other things ‘leaving her nothing to lie on and scarce to sit on’. The fines of Elizabeth Wall, Richard Smith, Thomas Aslin, John Penfold and Richard Crowly, amounting to £11 1s were also paid by distraint of goods and apparel. The year continued in persecution. John Fox was fined £20 on 16th November, and £14 3 shillings on 29 November. Mary Marshall ‘a poor, ancient woman’ was fined £11 2 shillings and 14 pounds of linen yard, and her bedclothes were taken in lieu of the fine.
On 2nd December 1684, the informers Smith and Warner went again to John Fox’s house. Fox asked to see the warrant, which Smith showed him. It included a clause which mentioned that an illegal meeting had taken place, with more than five persons in addition to the family, which Fox said was not true. Smith is reported to have snatched the warrant out of Fox’s hand, kicked him and called him ‘son of a whore’. The officers then came with a cart and horse, and Thomas Stubbs a carpenter, whom they employed to take down the bedsteads. The informers and officers loaded away other goods and took away meat and drink, a cask containing beer, the matting that was nailed to the floor, a bench that was fastened to the house, a copper which was fastened in a furnace, and a cow and hay out of the yard. Little of any value remained, except the bed on which Fox’s sick wife lay. The value of the goods taken at this time was about £14 3 shillings.
On 29 November, Smith and Warner came yet again with officers. The Quakers recorded that Smith threatened the officers that if they left anything in the house worth a penny, he ‘would make it cost them £5 a man; upon which they swept away all they could find’. The officers continued ransacking the house until about 8pm, when, the weather being very cold, John Fox and his whole family - his wife, four small children under four years old, and two maid servants – ‘were forced to lodge at other houses having neither bed nor bedclothes left, by which time they and the children contracted much cold’. The goods taken at that time, valued at £8 11 shillings and three pence, were sold to Warner the informer for £2 2 shillings and sixpence.
This constant harassment of the Quakers continued down until 1686 when a local proclamation of 7 December 1686 ordered that the informer John Smith was no longer to vex and prosecute the Quakers. In 1687, James II introduced religious toleration to England and Scotland by royal warrant. James II was a Roman Catholic and wanted to grant the church freedom to practice in England. Parliament would not pass such an act, so he did so on royal authority through a Declaration of Indulgence. This granted broad religious freedom by suspending penal laws enforcing conformity to the Church of England and allowing people to worship in their homes or chapels.
Following the Declaration of Indulgence being enacted in Parliament, the Quakers continued to meet in Wymeswold without fear of arrest. Perhaps seven or eight families were involved, illustrated by a Visitation of 1709, which recorded twenty Quakers, although by 1712 there were only six.
By his will of 1717, John Fox left in trust for the use of the Friends the Meeting House and their orchard graveyard on the Stockwell. This orchard had already been used to bury John and Elizabeth Fox's eldest son, George, when he died in 1696 aged nine. Their surviving son, Samuel Fox (born1695) and his cousin, also John Fox, continued the Quaker tradition in Wymeswold. Thomas Story in his journal in 1717, writes that he went from Sileby ‘to Wimeswold, and lodged that night with Samuel Fox. The next day I had a meeting there which was very small, but open and lively in the main.’ In 1730, Joseph Thomas, yeoman of Wymeswold, left £5 in trust ‘to give and distribute the same … to and amongst the poorer sort of the people called Quaker that resort to the Quakers meeting house of Wimesold…’ and £100 for educating ten poor boys of any denomination at the Town School, which at that time was at the north-east corner of the churchyard.
The latest record of Wymeswold Quakers found to date occurs in the Old Dalby account book, where the final year listed, 1762, records contributions from the Wymeswold Meeting. But in 1802, a grandson of the elder John Fox sold the Meeting House and in the same year another member of the Fox family sold the adjoining land on which the Methodist church rooms were built.
