Eye - 02 June 2017
From seeking to devotion
Seeking Friends and earth
‘Be bold! Never be afraid to admit your mistakes! That’s how we learn!’ So wrote Jill Allum, of Beccles Meeting, in a recent missive to Eye.
In ‘A terrier for tales’ (Eye, 5 May) Jill told Friends about her search for information on John Scales, a Quaker who lived from 1713 to 1770.
She wrote: ‘The only Quaker Meeting locally then was in Beccles, so he probably had to travel from Lowestoft, eight miles.’
However, the tale was developing swiftly: ‘I wrote the page in March that became the Eye story in May and by then this terrier was sniffing in a different direction…
‘I thought that the only Local Meeting in the 1700s was at Beccles… but then I began to go to Pakefield Meeting and offered to be a terrier for them.
‘Pakefield know that their Meeting house was built in 1833 and not much about themselves before that…
‘[John Scales] had grocers shops at both Beccles and Pakefield. But looking at pages of actual Monthly Meeting minutes, I was finding that he is nearly always the representative of Pakefield Meeting, which must have been in existence then.
‘Travelling huge distances by horseback can’t have been a problem. John was at Needham (Norfolk) for Quarterly Meeting in 1744, Ipswich (forty-five miles away) and then Woodbridge for Monthly Meetings in 1759.’
As Jill industriously scours the pages of history for further traces of John Scales it is perhaps inevitable that her search hits upon familiar ground, this time the Worlingham Quaker Burial Ground.
‘Ever since I moved to Beccles in 1995 I have been intrigued to find the location of this early burial ground for Quakers.’
Following a fruitful hour with Robert Mason, the curator of Beccles Museum, Jill has a new theory about a ‘pightle’.
‘A pightle is an enclosed piece of land, about the size we are looking for,’ Robert commented as Jill theorised that pightle number nineteen on the 1840 tithe map could be the burial ground – a piece of ground the same size as the gift of land in 1670.
John Scales is known to not only be buried there but also to have inspected it regularly with Caleb Clark of Kirkby.
The plot thickens as John’s descendent recently discovered, in A Brief Account of Many of the Prosecutions of the people called Quakers by Joseph Besse, the case of: ‘John Scales of Pakefield and Caleb Clark of Kirkby [who] were prosecuted in the Ecclesiastical Court at Norwich for Small Tithe and Easter Offerings at the Suit of Philip Richardson, parson of both those parishes… The demand on Scales was for one year’s tithe of a Pightle, the yearly rent whereof was but ten shillings and two pence for one year’s Easter Offering.’
Jill wonders: ‘Could it be that John Scales, or his father, was refusing to pay the tax to the church on this piece of land being used for Quaker burials – this pightle? Quakers came out of the churches, so very often refused to pay tithes and were fined heavily or imprisoned. Many died in the prisons.’
A devoted reader
An Eye reader spied an unusual send-off for a Friend in the Guardian’s letters page on 9 May.
A Friend from York wrote: ‘As members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), we have long held the view that at the end of life we meet to give thanks for and celebrate the grace of God or goodness in our deceased friend’s life…
‘My husband… was an avid reader of the Guardian. His head was most often buried in it. Our family and I part-teased him that on his death he would be wrapped in the Guardian. He chuckled and liked the idea.
‘Sure enough, the funeral directors… went out of their way to encase a coffin in back copies, ensuring that [his] favourite bits – crosswords, letters, editorials and notes and queries – were prominently shown. It was a huge success witnessed by 200-plus people.’
Proto-Quakers?
A quote about William Cecil (Eye, 21 April) spurred Meg Hill, from Cumbria, to write to Eye.
‘Someone else I think of as a proto-Quaker is bishop William Barlow of St Davids, who said, having preached against purgatory and confession: “When two or three persons, even cobblers or weavers, were in company, and elected, in the name of God, that there was the true church of God.”
‘His teaching had an effect on those who became the ancestors of early Welsh Quakers, like the Lloyds of Dolobran.’
Eye was intrigued and discovered, in Who’s who in British history: A-H, that William Barlow was considered ‘a strong reformer’ and, when he was made bishop of St David’s in 1536, ‘at once fell out with the canons’ for the preaching quoted by Meg.
Comments
Please login to add a comment
