William Edmundson

William Edmundson was born in 1627 at Little Musgrave in Westmorland, the youngest of the six children of John and Grace Edmundson. Both parents died while he was young, and he was placed as an apprentice at York to learn house-carpentry. He was, by his own account, religiously troubled from boyhood without knowing what to do about it. When the Civil War came he went into the Parliament’s army, served under Cromwell in Scotland, and fought at the battle of Worcester in 1651. His Journal records that after the fighting his mind was uneasy — and that he “fled from judgment, and made merry over God’s witness in his conscience which testified against him.”

In 1652 he delivered a body of recruits to Scotland, left the army, and returned to England. He married in Derbyshire, and then, meeting a brother who had soldiered in Ireland, resolved to settle there himself. He took a stock of goods with him to set up as a shopkeeper, landed at Dublin, and settled at Antrim.

Convincement and the First Meeting in Ireland

His convincement came on a buying trip back to England in 1653. George Fox and James Nayler were then holding meetings in the north, and Edmundson walked three miles to hear Nayler, taking his brother Thomas and another kinsman with him. All three were convinced. Returning to Ireland with fresh goods, he landed at Carrickfergus and was immediately confronted with the oath demanded by the revenue officers. He refused it, telling them that swearing was contrary to Christ’s command. It was the first such refusal the Irish authorities had met with, and the rumours it started were the beginning of Ireland’s acquaintance with Quakers.

In the spring of 1654 he moved to County Armagh, keeping a store and grazing cattle, and drawing local attention by using “thee” and “thou” to single persons and by holding to one fixed price for his goods — a practice that hurt his trade before it made his reputation. His wife and brother having also come among Friends, the household began meeting twice a week for worship. Four others joined them. That meeting of seven, held at Lurgan in 1654, was the first meeting of Friends established in Ireland.

Fifty Years’ Labour

Everything after that follows from it. Edmundson spent the rest of his life building the Society of Friends in Ireland, travelling constantly, suffering repeated imprisonment, and settling for most of his life at Rosenallis in Queen’s County. He went to England in 1655 expressly to meet George Fox, whom he had not yet seen, and found him at a great meeting in Leicestershire. He crossed the Atlantic more than once, carrying Quakerism into Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and in 1672 took part in the celebrated Rhode Island disputation with Roger Williams — an encounter Williams recorded, with considerable irritation, in George Fox Digg’d out of his Burrowes. He died on the thirty-first day of the sixth month, 1712, aged eighty-five.

His Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Labour of Love of William Edmundson is the foundational source for Irish Quakerism and one of the earliest first-hand accounts of Friends in the southern American colonies. It is a plain book by a plain man — a carpenter and shopkeeper who never acquired Barclay’s learning or Penn’s polish — and its authority rests on exactly that. Friends Illuminated has published the complete journal in a modern English edition.

Biographical detail on this page follows Samuel Janney’s History of the Religious Society of Friends (vol. I, ch. IX), which draws directly on Edmundson’s own Journal and on Rutty’s Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers in Ireland*, together with the* Dictionary of National Biography*.*