The Life of Benjamin Bangs

Benjamin Bangs was born at Longham in Norfolk in 1652, the seventh of nine children, and his father died before he was old enough to remember him. What the book is really about begins with his mother. She had been raised a clergyman’s daughter — her father held the benefice of Royston in Hertfordshire, and the old people there still wept at his name when her son passed through the town years later — and she had the education and the judgement to watch what happened to the English church in her lifetime and draw her own conclusions. After the beheading of Charles I she would not go and hear the preachers who were brought in, however hard they courted her. After the Restoration she watched the same men who had turned Nonconformist turn Conformist again, and concluded that livings mattered more to them than religion did. She told her children she believed the Lord would raise up a people more agreeable to his will, and that she meant to wait and see who they were.

She went to find them. The first Quaker she sought out, six miles off, turned out to be a disappointment — a wise woman could see at once that his zeal outran his knowledge — and she rode home uneasy, her small son in the saddle in front of her. It did not stop her. She moved the household to Norwich to be nearer the people she had heard suffered so much, and her son grew up inside that search.

He was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and he was still a young man when the persecution reached him directly. The London chapters are the sharpest in the book: Sir John Robinson, lieutenant of the Tower, maliciously set against Friends; soldiers at the Bull-and-Mouth; the trained bands turned out with halberds against people sitting silently in a room. Bangs records it without heat, which makes it worse. He names the streets — Gracechurch Street, Covent Garden, Charing Cross, Ratcliff, Whitechapel, Grub Street — and the effect is of a man walking you through a city he knew in his bones, pointing out where each thing happened.

Then there is the dispute. A town priest in Norfolk challenged the Quakers publicly, and Bangs took him up on it, and the exchange runs for most of a chapter. The priest opens by telling him that if he asks one question of divinity Bangs will not be able to answer a word. It goes badly for the priest from there. Bangs presses him on the apostle’s commission — to turn people from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God — and asks him how many he has turned since he came to the parish. He gets no answer, so he suggests the man give the money back. What makes the scene worth reading is not that Bangs wins it. It is the texture of it: the chair that gets brought out, the priest sitting down to think, the sudden recollection of a verse he has forgotten, the parishioners standing about listening to their own minister being taken apart on the subject of whether he has ever done them any good.

The travelling occupies the rest. Bangs seems to have ridden almost everywhere there were Friends: the Isle of Purbeck and Weymouth and Poole in the south, Ringwood and Southampton and Portsmouth, Kent and Canterbury and Dover, the eastern counties he was raised in, up through Lincolnshire and Brigg and Hull to York and Leeds and Malton, across to Swarthmoor and Kendal and Penrith and Carlisle, down into Herefordshire and Radnorshire and Welshpool, and over to Ireland in 1682 to visit Friends at Dublin and in Antrim and Munster and as far as Tralee. He married Mary Lowe and settled in Cheshire, at Stockport and then near Frandley, and went on travelling out of there for decades more.

The volume closes with the testimony given concerning him by the Quarterly Meeting of Cheshire at Newton near Middlewich, in the twelfth month of 1741, after his death. It says he could not be persuaded to carry his own memoirs any further than he had, that he kept attending meetings when he had long stopped travelling, and that he knew how to divide the word rightly. It also preserves something he said near the end, which is as good a summary of the book as anything in it: that he now knew and witnessed the saying of his Lord fulfilled, that out of his belly should flow rivers of living water.