He is our cousin, Cousin: A Quaker Family’s History from 1660 to the Present Day

Chapter 1

To begin at the beginning

‘To begin at the beginning’, to quote Dylan Thomas’ famous opening of Under Milk Wood, seems as fair a place to start as any. For the Quaker family of Barlow, that beginning goes right back to the very birth of Quakerism, sometime around the 1660’s, when its founder, George Fox was gathering his first followers about him and much of our earliest Quaker ancestry is gleaned from the family Bible, known as the Lancaster Bible, dating from 1616, after its first owner, James Lancaster. Lancaster, our earliest recorded Quaker ancestor (1610-1679), was amongst the first to join up with Fox, and this Bible, still stained by the salt water from when he dropped it as he was fleeing persecution across Morecambe sands, has been handed down through his daughter’s family ever since and now belongs to my elder brother David. This book will tell the story of the nearly 400 years of our family history, since James Lancaster first acquired that Bible.

My Grandfather, John Henry Barlow (1855-1924), was the first to write a history of this Bible, in the Quaker publication, The Quarterly Examiner, in 1898 and I can’t do better than repeat his scene-setting introduction:

In the year 1616 the printing house of Robert Barker, ‘Printer to the King’s most excellent Maisetie’, (sic) was busy with an edition of the Bible. It was only five years before this that the Authorised Version had been published and we may therefore suppose that when the sheets were finally bound into volumes, they found a pretty ready sale. One of these lies before me on the table as I write…..

James Lancaster was born in 1610, just six years before the printing of this Bible, on the island of Walney in what is now Cumbria. The island lies in the Irish Sea to the west of the Furness peninsula in north-west England and up until as late as 1974, both the island and the peninsula were a detached part of the county of Lancashire, but today the island is part of the borough of Barrow-in-Furness, having been connected by a bridge since 1908. Young James was a yeoman who lived in North Scale on the northern edge of Walney Island, a former royalist stronghold during the English Civil War. In fact Quakerism in the 17th century, was the natural refuge of those who disagreed with the Presbyterian organisation of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, though ironically, as it turned out, it was actually Cromwell who would become the most sympathetic to Fox’s beliefs and who eventually gave the Quakers their religious freedom.

So in many ways, Cumbria could be said to be the birthplace of Quakerism; George Fox preached on Pardshaw Crag in 1653, drawing huge crowds and Pardshaw and Pardshaw Hall, near Cockermouth, became strongholds of Quakerism from its earliest days. Other preachers of the period, did not find Cumbria particularly conducive to their missions, but for Fox, it was exactly the reverse. When he allied himself with the ‘Westmoreland Seekers’, a group of spiritual dissenters, who met in private homes and public buildings to discuss scriptures and religious issues of the day, he found a ready audience. As Fox continued to travel throughout the region, these groups naturally coalesced and on Sunday, June 13th, 1652 on Firbank Fell, over a thousand people gathered in the open air, to hear him preach. This now famous gathering has often been recorded as the first ever Quaker Meeting.

After James Lancaster was ‘convinced’, as Quakers describe joining the Society, he went on to become one of the most prominent of the first Quaker missionaries and a member of that elite group known as the ‘Valiant Sixty’, the earliest leaders and activists in the Society. They were itinerant preachers, mostly from northern England, who spread the ideas of Quakerism throughout Britain, Europe and America during the second half of the Seventeenth Century. The first religious meetings of Friends, as we would recognise them, began in a private house in Cumberland in 1653. As the numbers grew, the meetings could not be contained indoors and for many years they met in the open air on Pardshaw Crag. But eventually, in 1672, a purpose built Meeting House was built at Pardshaw, which within a few years was already too small and by 1705 had to be further enlarged. Soon other Meeting Houses sprang up all over the county, such as those at Swarthmoor¹ near Ulverston, Brigflatts near Sedbergh and Kendal, which seemed to fit perfectly into the Cumbrian landscape. Today, meeting for worship still takes place in Kendal, in a building which stands on the land originally purchased for the first meeting house there in 1687, though the current building only dates from 1816 and now houses the renowned Quaker Tapestry.

Quaker associations

George Fox, 1624 – 1691 Possibly by R. Sawyer etching, late 18th to early 19th century

The Author writes:

Fox was an English Dissenter and a founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers or Friends.

©Reproduced by kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Swarthmoor Hall built c.1568.

The Author writes:

This was the home of the Assize Judge, Thomas Fell, and his wife Margaret and family. Today it is a Quaker retreat.

Any student of the early history of the Society of Friends will soon come across the name of James Lancaster, for he became a frequent and trusted companion of George Fox, travelling with him throughout the country on his ministry. At what period of his life the old family Bible came into his possession it is difficult to say, but on one of the leaves at the front of the Bible is the following note written in 1780 by Mary Nicholson of Whitehaven, who inherited it from her great grandfather, John Nicholson who married Lancaster’s daughter Dinah:

"James Lancaster was ‘convinced’ by George Fox in 1652 and in 1654 went on a gospel mission to Scotland and again in 1657; in 1665 he visited many of the Midland counties and in 1669 he went to Ireland. There was not perhaps anyone who was so much associated with George Fox as James Lancaster, often acting as his amanuensis."

James Lancaster was married to Margaret (b 1631) in 1652, and they had at least eight children, including Ishmael (1653), Dinah (1656), Deborah (1660) and Elisha (1664), the latter three of which are confirmed in the Quaker records at Friends House. Deborah married John Marshall, son of Nicholas Marshall of Biggar, Walney Island, at Swarthmoor in 1689, and Dinah married John Nicholson in 1678 at Pardshaw, Cumberland, both Quakers, and according to the Quaker archives², established generations of Quakers, amongst which, number of course, our many forebears, not to mention the current members of our family.

It is necessary, for a moment, however, to return to George Fox. He was born in 1624 in Leicestershire, and from an early age, mingled with many of the Dissenters who had broken away from the established church. But Fox was an individualist, who soon found himself in disagreement with the others and began to formulate his own beliefs, which would become the very heart of future Quaker thought. He believed that ritual was not important in worship, and neither were church buildings, for it was his strong conviction that ‘God could be found everywhere’. Most importantly, he said that church ministry should not be confined to a professional priesthood, as anyone who was guided by the Holy Spirit, had a right to minister and to seek God’s inner light in the individual.

By 1647 the Religious Society of Friends was taking shape and Fox was travelling around the country, preaching publicly in market-places, fields or anywhere he could find an audience, nearly always with James Lancaster at his side. He was a powerful and charismatic preacher and he soon began to attract a substantial following. It is not entirely clear at what precise point the Society of Friends was formed, but certainly by 1650 there was already a group of people who regularly travelled together, calling themselves ‘Friends of the Truth’ and later simply ‘Friends’. Also by this time, their style of worship had been firmly established, much in the form we are familiar with today, of a silent gathering ‘waiting on the Lord’. Needless to say they attracted a great deal of attention, partly because of their distinctive, simple attire and partly because they refused to swear oaths or pay tithes to the established church. Fox campaigned against the paying of tithes, because, he said, these usually went into the pockets of absentee landlords or religious organisations, far away from the paying parishioners. This inevitably brought Fox and his followers into conflict with officials and the general public, who would whip and beat them to drive them away.Oppression by the powerful, was a very real concern for the English people in the turmoil of the English Civil War between the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the beginnings of the Commonwealth in 1653. And certainly Fox’s beliefs, such as for instance, that you didn’t need to have a university qualification in order to be a preacher, or in addition, his total disregard for the established church, were bound, sooner or later to bring him up against the civil authorities and before long he and many others were frequently being imprisoned.

In fact, Cromwell himself was quite tolerant towards those with different beliefs. This was apparent both by his decision to re-admit Jews into England and in his relaxation of the harsh persecution of Catholics. But though, in reality, he was sympathetic to Fox’s views, meeting with him on several occasions, this did not guarantee Fox’s or his followers’ safety. Indeed, the authorities continued to ill-treat Fox and those around him and the many widespread inequities that they witnessed during their years of persecution, led to the establishment within the Society, of ‘Meeting for Sufferings’. Such gatherings, would closely monitor the treatment of fellow Quakers, but at a deeper level, they also inspired within his growing movement an interest in social justice which would become a hallmark of so many Quakers, from prison reformers such as Elizabeth Fry and the campaigners against slavery such as our great, great Grandfather, Samuel Bowly³ to the caring industrialists such as Cadbury and Carr, and ‘Meeting for Sufferings’ remains to this day, a vital part of Quaker