The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1655-1755 (review)

ßooic Reviews The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1655-1755. By Richard T. Vann. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. xiv, 259 pp. $7.00. "The early Friends wrote the history of their movement; the sociology of it was written by their enemies." So opens the key chapter of this witty, definitive sociology of early Quakerism, by Richard Vann, history professor at Wesleyan University. The core of uus study is a tabulation of the social data on all known male Quakers of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, and the city of Norwich, for six or seven key dates between 1660 and 1740. This makes a block of 4,594 men by jobs and dates. The limits of significance in each body of data are clearly drawn; also, conversely, projections are made from family professions and age-group life-expectancies for individuals whose job- or death-notes are lost. Comparisons with two cross-sections of corresponding non-Quaker populations (Gloucestershire, 1608, and Gregory King's, 1688), with parish registers, and with records of Baptist and odier congregations are tabulated; Vann analyzes carefully the vocations described in his Keysorted data. His main diesis is that Friends did not start poor and proletarian, indeed "at the beginnings of Quakerism, the gentry and wholesale traders were especially drawn to it" (p. 50), and the petite bourgeoisie, like laborers, were underrepresented. Instead, Vann documents the concept of Max Weber that sects begin with a vertical cross-section of society, and shake down into being concentrated in particular classes and regions. He is clearly right about the rejection of Quakerism by the oldest sons of Quaker wealth (Fells, Penns, and Gurneys as well as Bellers), and by the lowest social strata, called by Friends "the rude People": "there is no conservatism like that of die very poor" (p. 58). Also he shows that "except in the largest cides" (p. 79), the social level of Friends lowered between 1662 and 1689; but here I wish he had interwoven more fully the thinking of this sociological chapter (II) witìi his awareness of the social and political pressures under the Restoration parliaments' persecutions. Social status, even among AngloSaxons , has never been purely economic. Richard Vann's otììer conclusions are equally stimulating and documented. He shows statistically that after 1670 tìiose Friends nominated to monthly and quarterly meetings and to time-consuming committees like the Meeting for Sufferings were indeed wealthier than average. But he gives no data demonstrating that Friends "traveling in the ministry" were also usually richer merchants (p. 98). I think "ministers" were always diverse, not just in the first decade of the outpouring of serving-maids and yeomen as Quaker preachers. From the start, prominent Friends like Stoddard, Pearson, and Penington played special roles, yet a comparison widi the leadership groups, even of the Baptists, might show Friends as still the least upper-class English religious group up to 1740. Vann does show that early Friends have a higher 125 126QUAKER HISTORY ratio of men to women, and an older age of conversion or entry dian other sects in the Puritan heritage. Until equally careful surveys are made in other counties it will be hard to disprove his assumption that Bucks and Norfolk Friends were specially typical of English Quakers. Vann's third chapter, on persecution and organization, is best in the same areas as the preceding, for instance in careful data on the varying dates when Quakerism reached its maximum growth in various regions. He documents the effect of persecution on local organization but sees less clearly its role in shifting the purpose of organization, and especially of ministry, which was at first missionary but later was mainly the link to strengthen existing meetings. Thus it is not enough to say that "in 1660 Quakers had neither any established organization for resisting persecution nor any source of ideas as to how to get one" (p. 91). Cornwall in 1656 and Massachusetts in 1658 discovered how efficiently and promptìy the Quaker network could respond to persecution of their preachers, but die all-out persecution of Quakers on their home grounds after 1660 was a new problem evoking new solutions; by comparison with the theoretically more...