Fox · 1652
George Fox at Pendle Hill
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 standing 1681 grant of the colony of Pennsylvania was the foundational Quaker political project).
It is twenty past nine on the morning of an unrecorded day in early June 1652, on the long flat summit of Pendle Hill in eastern Lancashire, in clear summer light with the view down across the Forest of Bowland to the west and the Trough of Bolland to the east. He is twenty-eight years old. He is George Fox, born at Drayton-in-the-Clay (the modern Fenny Drayton) in Leicestershire in July 1624, son of Christopher Fox the weaver (a local Puritan churchwarden) and Mary Lago, apprenticed to a shoemaker at sixteen, in the seventh year of itinerant religious seeking across the English midlands and the north since his breaking with the Drayton parish ministry at twenty-one.
He has, in his coat-pocket, a folio of his notes (the draft of what would become, three years later, the journal of his ministry, eventually published as A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love of George Fox, 1694). He has, on his daily walking-circuit since the previous May, come up from Settle in the West Riding via Long Preston and Gisburn, and has climbed the south-east face of Pendle Hill from the village of Barley on the rising-path that the tradition records as his ascent route.
He thinks, by his journal entry recorded a year later: the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered. As I went down, I found 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.
He thinks, by the nineteenth-century editorial reading of the journal-passage by Norman Penney: the country below me, in the valleys of the Yorkshire Dales and the Lancashire Trough, is the country of the Seekers congregations who have been looking for fifteen years for the church-form that I have, on this hill this morning, finally seen the form of.
He thinks: I will go down to Sedbergh and to Firbank Fell. The Seekers congregation under Francis Howgill is at Firbank on the Whitsuntide gathering. The thousand-person gathering is the Lancashire-Yorkshire Seekers congregation. The message I will give them is the message I have, this morning, finally been able to put into words.
He came down off Pendle Hill in the afternoon, drank from the spring on the southern face (the George Fox's Well of the modern walking-route, marked by a inscribed stone since 1856), walked north-west through the next week to Sedbergh in the West Riding, and addressed the Whitsun gathering at Firbank Fell on the thirteenth of June 1652. By the minutes of the gathering (preserved in the Quaker archive at Friends House on the Euston Road), about a thousand Seekers were on the fell that morning. Fox preached from a rock-outcrop (the Fox's Pulpit of the modern Quaker pilgrimage-route) for about three hours. About six hundred of the Seekers, by the register of the Lancashire-Yorkshire Quaker meetings of the next two years, converted that morning. The core of the original Quaker ministry (Francis Howgill, John Audland, John Camm, Edward Burrough, James Nayler, the Valiant Sixty of the early Quaker movement) were almost all converted at the Firbank Fell sermon.
The Religious Society of Friends spread through the Lancashire-Yorkshire-Westmorland north-west between 1652 and 1654, into the south of England by 1656, into Ireland by 1654, into the New England colonies by 1656 and Pennsylvania by 1681 (under the grant of the colony to William Penn by Charles II in payment of the king's debt to Penn's father the Admiral). The Quaker testimonies (the principles of plain speech, plain dress, refusal of oaths, refusal of military service, and the equality of women in ministry) became, by the nineteenth century, the institutional culture of the English-American mercantile-philanthropic Quaker community (the Cadburys, Frys, Rowntrees, Lloyds, Barclays, Bryants, Mays, and others of the Quaker family-business tradition). George Fox himself died at White Hart Court in London on the thirteenth of January 1691, sixty-six years old. He is buried at Bunhill Fields, the nonconformist burial ground in Islington. The top of Pendle Hill, since 1949 in the custody of the National Trust, has a bronze plaque, put up by the Yearly Meeting of the Friends in Britain at the tercentenary of 1952, with the quotation from Fox's 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.