History in Cash Accounts

HISTORY IN CASH ACCOUNTS By Henry J. Cadbury Did you ever look up last year's engagement calendar to see what day it was that you were invited to a friend's birthday? Did you ever go over the stubs of old check books to see what year it was that your house was last painted? If so, you will understand to what shifts the historian is put who has to piece together the more distant unrecorded past from unpromising indirect sources. Much of Quaker history is incompletely recorded. As I have indicated elsewhere ,1 the best source for knowing of early Quakerism in the Caribbean islands is the wills. Local journals are lacking and, except for one small island, so are meeting minutes. Even in many other places, less prone to hurricanes or the climatic disintegration of paper, there are large gaps in our records. New England Yearly Meeting will celebrate its tercentenary in June 1961, but the early minutes are not extant. There are various references to the year, but the closest I can come to the date is an entry in the account book of John Bowne of Flushing. On a flyleaf he wrote in the summer of l66l the dates of various agricultural activities — harvesting, sowing turnip seed, cutting "pesen," and the swarming of "our bees." He included the following: "In the year 1661 upon the 11th day of the fourth month English account [that is, June; at Flushing the Dutch Calendar was also used} we went from our house at Flushing [the present Bowne House at Flushing is said to have been built in 1661] towards Rhode Island to the General Meeting where we did stay nine days time, and the twenty eighth day of the same month about the middle of the day we came home again." Allowing the same amount of time for the journey in each direction, we can fix this earliest of all Yearly Meetings as closely as somewhere between the fifteenth and the twenty-fourth of June, 1661.2 It is not any of Woolman's published writings but his account 1 Letter from the Past, No. 12, Friends Intelligencer, XCVIII (1941), 592 f. 2Cf. The Friend (London), CXI (1953), 373-374. 46 History in Cash Accounts47 books that have served lately to suggest his connection with the old schoolhouse in Mount Holly, now restored.3 The recent restoration of the charming mansion of William Corbit, Quaker, and of its furnishings at Odessa, Delaware, depended respectively on his careful record of "expenses in building my house" ( 1772-74) and on a much later inventory of his possessions.4 For the life of Swarthmore Hall in the seventeenth century the fullest picture is obtained not from letters but by the survivingpages of Sarah Fell's neat household account book, including a substantial period when Fox was living there, not reported in his Journal. From this source we learn when well-known Friends were guests at Swarthmore, as when seven shillings, sixpence were paid "for a fat sheep when William Penn was here."5 This visit is not noted in lives of Penn. Of course the illumination is sometimes the other way round: I mean that orthodox historical sources may be used to explain the cash accounts. Here is an instance that apparently escaped the sharp eye of Norman Penney. On July 4th, 1676, Sarah Fell notes money received "for a bottle of burns water used for Robert Jeckell" and, less than a week later, "for brandy used for Robert Jeckell." Now if we turn to that pious collection of dying experiences, Piety Promoted, we shall learn that "Robert Jeckell of New Castle-upon-Tyne, having a desire to visit G. Fox who was then at Swarthmore, began his journey, but was immediately taken sick. Still he pressed forward. He arrived at Swarthmore on the 2nd of 5th month [July], lay in bed sick nine days and died on the 1 1th of the month."6 3 Letter from the Past, No. 181, Friends Journal, VI (I960), 136. 4 John A. H. Sweeney, Grandeur on the Appoquinimink (Newark, Del., 1959). 5 The Household Account Book of Sarah Fell, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge...