George Fox at Pendle Hill

A new church is rarely founded in a pulpit. More often it is founded on a hillside, by a man who has walked himself out of every parish in England and at last finds, in the wind on a high ridge, the shape of the thing he has been listening for. The institution comes later, in minute-books and meeting-houses; the moment itself is solitary, weather-bound, and almost entirely interior.

THE WEAVER'S SON

George Fox is the son of a Leicestershire weaver, born at Drayton-in-the-Clay in July 1624 to Christopher Fox, churchwarden of the parish, and Mary Lago, whose people had stood in the old Lollard country since before living memory. The boy is apprenticed at sixteen to a shoemaker who also keeps sheep, and the trade suits him: leather and wool, the slow turning of an awl, long hours when a mind can range. At nineteen, in the summer of 1643, he leaves Drayton on foot and does not settle again. For six years he walks the midlands and the north, from Mansfield to Lichfield to Nottingham, lodging in barns and at the houses of priests and professors, asking each in turn whether they can speak to his condition. None can. The Church of England has cracked open in the war years, and into the crack have poured Ranters, Seekers, Familists, Muggletonians, every kind of awakened tradesman who suspects the steeple-house is empty. By his twenty-eighth year Fox has worn a coat to threads, has been beaten in three market-places, has heard, in his own phrase, one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to his condition, and now carries that voice north into Lancashire, looking for the people it was promised to.

THE ASCENT

It is early June of 1652. He has come up from Settle by way of Long Preston and Gisburn, walking the drovers' tracks, and at Barley the great whaleback of Pendle Hill stands across the morning, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven feet of flat sandstone laid out east to west between the Ribble and the Yorkshire fells. The weather is clear, the bracken still low, the air smelling of peat and sheep. He is moved, he will write later, of the Lord to go up to the top of it. The path from the south-east face is steep but plain. He climbs alone, in worsted, with a folio of notes in his coat-pocket and very little in his belly; he has eaten and drunk but little for several days. The country falls away behind him in greens and greys, the Forest of Bowland to the west, the Trough of Bolland eastward, smoke from a dozen hearths rising thin out of the valleys. Near the summit the wind takes him plainly in the face. He stops, sets his hand against the cold stone of the cairn, and looks north.

A GREAT PEOPLE TO BE GATHERED

What he sees is not, in the strict sense, seen. The eye gives him the sea bordering upon Lancashire, the long blue line of Morecambe Bay, the dales running back into Yorkshire like the fingers of an open hand; the inner sight gives him the valleys peopled. He has, by his journal entry written the year following, this from the Lord: in what places he had a great people to be gathered. The phrase steadies him. For six years he has been one man with a coat and a question; for six years the answer has been individual, a matter of his condition only. Now the answer enlarges. There are, down there, between Sedbergh and Kendal and Preston Patrick, congregations of Seekers who have been sitting in silence in barns since the late 1630s, refusing the prayer book, refusing the Directory, waiting for a ministry that has not yet arrived. He has heard their names on the road; he knows Francis Howgill is preaching to them on Firbank Fell at the Whitsuntide gathering. The shape of it comes together in him in the time it takes to draw three breaths. The ministry is not to be a separate sect added to the others. It is to be the inward Christ spoken plainly to people who already wait for him; and the place to begin is the gathering already assembled, this week, three days' walk north-west across the moor. He stands on Pendle a long while afterwards, not from indecision but because the wind suits him, and on the way down he finds a spring of water in the side of the hill with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunk but little for several days before. The refreshment is small, cold, and exact. He fills his hat-crown and drinks, and goes on.

FIRBANK FELL

The week between Pendle and Firbank is a walk of perhaps fifty miles, through Clitheroe and Slaidburn, over the Bowland tops, down the Lune valley to Sedbergh. He arrives at Sedbergh on the eve of the Whitsun fair, preaches in the churchyard under a yew, and on the thirteenth of June 1652 climbs up to the chapel on Firbank Fell, where Francis Howgill and John Audland have already gathered, by the contemporary accounts, about a thousand Seekers. The chapel is small; the people are sat on the grass slope outside it, on the rock and the heather. Fox does not enter the building. He climbs onto a flat outcrop above the chapel, the stone the country will afterwards call Fox's Pulpit, and speaks for three hours. He speaks of the light that lighteth every man; of the steeple-houses that are not the church; of the spirit that gave forth the Scriptures being prior to the Scriptures themselves; of the equality of women in the ministry, which the gathering has not heard preached before in any pulpit in England. When he has done, the silence on the fell is the same silence the Seekers have kept for fifteen years, only now it has a centre. Howgill, Audland, John Camm, Edward Burrough, James Nayler, the men who within two years will be known to one another as the Valiant Sixty, come over to him on the rock. By the registers of the Lancashire and Yorkshire meetings of the following winter, about six hundred from the fell that day are within the year reckoned Friends.

THE COURT AT LANCASTER

The naming follows quickly, and from an adversary. In October 1652, at the Lancaster sessions, Fox is brought before Justice Gervase Bennet on a charge of blasphemy, and bids the bench tremble at the word of the Lord. Bennet, in derision, calls the prisoner and his people Quakers, and the name, intended for a courtroom sneer, sticks to them as such names do. By 1654 the Religious Society of Friends has a recognised form: monthly meetings, a discipline of plain speech and plain dress, a refusal of hat-honour, a refusal of oaths, a refusal of tithes, a refusal of the sword. The Commonwealth jails them in their hundreds; the Restoration jails them in their thousands. Fox himself is imprisoned eight times across his life, at Nottingham, at Derby, at Carlisle, at Launceston, at Lancaster, at Scarborough, at Worcester, in conditions that would have finished a softer man. He does not soften. In 1669 he marries Margaret Fell of Swarthmoor Hall, who has been the movement's administrator since the second year, and from Swarthmoor the letters go out to Friends in Ireland, in New England, in Barbados, in Holland. In 1671 he sails for the West Indies and the American mainland; in 1681 William Penn, son of the Admiral, takes the king's debt in land and lays out Pennsylvania on Quaker principles, and the great people gathered on a Lancashire hill have a colony.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

The testimonies hold longer than the founder. Plain speech, plain dress, the refusal of oaths and of military service, the equal voice of women in meeting: these become, across the next two centuries, the working culture of an English and American mercantile community whose names are still on the high street, Cadbury and Fry and Rowntree, Lloyd and Barclay, Bryant and May. The Friends in the year 2025 number about three hundred and eighty thousand worldwide, concentrated still in Pennsylvania and the English north-west, and the silent meeting, an hour of unprogrammed quiet from which any may speak as moved, is recognisably the silence of Firbank Fell. George Fox dies at White Hart Court in London on the thirteenth of January 1691, aged sixty-six, and is buried at Bunhill Fields among the nonconformist dead. The summit of Pendle Hill passes to the National Trust in 1949, and in 1952, at the tercentenary, the Yearly Meeting of Friends in Britain sets a bronze plaque into the cairn with his own words from the Journal: as we travelled, we came near a very great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it. When I came atop of it, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.

THE SPRING ON THE HILL

A church founded on a hillside has no founding stone, only a vantage and a wind. What remains in the country afterwards is not the moment of the seeing but the small fact attached to it: a spring in the side of the hill, lower than the cairn, narrow enough that a man can fill his hat-crown from it, cold the year round. The walkers up from Barley still stop there. The stone above it, cut in 1856, names the well for him.