Leeds Friends' Meeting Book, 1692-1712 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Leeds Friends' Meeting Book, 1692-1712. Edited by Jean and Russell Mortimer. Leeds: The Yorkshire Archaelogical Society, 1980. 269 pages.£14.90. Those who know Russell Mortimer's two earlier volumes of Minutes of Bristol Men's Meeting (published in 1971 and 1978) will be pleased to see this new work done jointly by Russell and Jean Mortimer. The same high calibre of editing is to be found in this volume containing the earliest extant minutes of Leeds Preparative Meeting from 1692 to 1713. The book opens with a valuable 37-page introduction which contains, among other items, a list of Yorkshire Meetings in 1669 as well as brief but significant treatments of such items as meeting property, meetings for worship, meetings for church business, and registration of births, marriages, and burials. Then there are 189 pages containing the minutes of the preparative meeting, the "Poor Accounts" from 1693 to 1713, and lists of appointments (to attend Monthly Meetings and to accompany travelling Friends) . Also included are 40 pages of very valuable biographical notes on nearly four hundred individual Friends. The minutes themselves reflect those concerns common to all Friends at the close of the seventeenth century—absence from meeting, sleeping in meeting, repair and upkeep of meeting houses, attendance at monthly meetings, poor relief, care of travelling Friends, outgoing in marriage, assisting in apprenticeship cases, excessive drinking, plainness, sufferings, settlement of disputes, etc. The book is especially valuable for several reasons: 1) It shows how much freedom and responsibility for its own affairs rested with the preparative meeting; 2) that the office of elder appeared in Leeds as early as 1702, even though it was not until 1727 that London Yearly Meeting established a recognized proceeding of regular appointments to this office; 3) a concept of membership existed long before the Yearly Meeting established its "Rules of Settlement" in the 1730s (with people asking "to be a member of this meeting" as early as 1701 ) . Southern Methodist UniversityKenneth L. Carroll Quakers in the Colonial Northeast. By Arthur J. Worrall. Hanover, N.H. and London: University Press of New England, 1980. x, 238 pages. The first fruit of a project to revise Rufus Jones, The Quakers in the American colonies (1911), WorralFs view of the northeastern region is a spare, refreshing gift óf truth to the Society of Friends. It requires and deserves close reading, because it is a closely articulated set of new generalizations . Why did Friends, expecting that their kind of religion would win the New World, decline by the end of die colonial period? "Reform," accord55 ...