Fox

On a morning in the summer of 1652, on the summit of Pendle Hill in eastern Lancashire (a long flat-topped sandstone ridge of 1,827 feet that dominates the country between the Ribble valley and the Yorkshire Dales), George Fox, twenty-eight years old, a Leicestershire weaver's apprentice who had been an itinerant religious seeker for the past six years across the English midlands and the north, climbed alone to the top of the hill and experienced, by his own account in his Journal (begun the next year and completed in the form by 1675), a vision of a great people to be gathered across the valleys below him. The vision was the pivot of his ministry. He came down off the hill, walked north-west to Sedbergh in the West Riding the following week, addressed a thousand-person preaching gathering of unsettled Seekers (a Lancashire-Yorkshire Calvinist-Anabaptist congregation under the ministry of Francis Howgill) at Firbank Fell on the thirteenth of June 1652, and gathered to himself the first formal congregation of what would, within two years, be called the Religious Society of Friends (or, in the courtroom-derogatory term, Quakers). The Quaker movement spread through the north-west and across the Atlantic by 1670; the Friends in 2025 had about 380,000 active members worldwide, with a strong concentration in Pennsylvania (where William Penn's 1681 grant of the colony of Pennsylvania was the foundational Quaker political project).

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