Quaker Social History 1669-1738 (review)

Book Reviews Quaker Social History 1669-1738. By Arnold Lloyd. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1950. xv, 207 pages. $5.00. *T" HAT an author and publisher can be found in these days to produce such a substantial detailed monograph on one phase of Quaker history is very encouraging. The subject is an interesting one. Though the title scarcely describes it I have no better brief title to suggest. What the author undertakes to show is how from its simpler beginnings the Society of Friends developed a central organization and a rather unified control of local practice. He deals with areas in which this development can be traced, like poor relief, marriage, relations to the state and to the Church of England, public stocks (funds) , the printed publication, the care of youth and the discipline of members. Most of these subjects have been discussed in earlier histories, but by bringing them into parallel chapters, brief but packed with detail, the author focusses attention on an interesting set of problems. At the end of the period, which coincides incidentally with the beginning of definite membership in the Society of Friends, we find a national system of Quaker church government that could stand the strain of two centuries thereafter, with a rigid discipline administered by a vigilant national assembly. Instead of tracing this to the work of George Fox in 1669 and earlier in creating a loose federation of local general meetings, with the independent monthly meetings, Arnold Lloyd lays stress upon the development in the years after 1675 of a set of strong central meetings in London and the hierarchy of Yearly, Quarterly and Monthly Meetings. Particularly important he finds the attention paid by the Meeting for Sufferings to the legal relief of the difficulties of Friends throughout the nation. The same machinery was then applied to other matters, as for example by queries regulating many of the practices of Quaker daily life. Sometimes the author seems to share a recent tendency to belittle George Fox, as for example in the Nayler episode. What I think he does understate is the powerful influence that Fox exercised first in establishing Monthly Meetings, then the Women's Meetings. Enemies of the latter certainly made him their principal target. I suspect also that he had a good deal more to do with the development of the central meetings than is commonly recognized from his truncated Journal. Though not an official representative on the Meeting for Sufferings, yet during most of its first fifteen years until his death he met with it and with the other important central meetings whenever he was in London and in fact remained in the South instead of at Swarthmore for this very purpose, as his wife testifies. His own papers, some of them published (Beck and Ball, London Friends Meetings, 95ff; A. R. Barclay, Letters, &c, of 108 Book Reviews109 Early Friends, in A Select Series, vol. 7, no. 114) , show that the centralizing movement had his approval, if not his actual guidance. Of course there were then other able men in London, some of them technically or practically more competent, and much of the development and systematizing, was almost automatic and inevitable with the lapse of time and not personally planned. Its effect on the first fervor along with the release from persecution, produced subtle spiritual results which are less tangible than the data with which this book is concerned. Beside his fresh putting of the problem we are indebted to the author for his first-hand use or quotation of a great deal of the original records which exist so abundantly. How difficult they are to digest I know full well. For minute books in England alone those that he has not consulted must be many more than those he has. The American reader will note that there is no reference to the parallel movement in Quakerism outside Great Britain, not even to the partial and informal jurisdiction over the American colonial Quakerism exercised in London itself. The words "in England" might well have been added to the title. Presumably for other areas similar exhaustive study of minutes would yield new fruits. But this reviewer is...