A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, Volume I

Among all the books the early Quakers left behind, none is quite so sobering as Joseph Besse’s A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers. The journals tell of openings and convincements; the epistles exhort and comfort; the controversial tracts argue and defend. But here, in Besse’s great work, the reader meets the plain and dreadful record of what it actually cost to be a Friend in seventeenth-century England — county by county, town by town, name by name, fine by fine, and prison by prison. It is a martyrology without the embellishment of the martyrologist: a ledger of suffering kept with the patience of a clerk and the conscience of a believer.

Joseph Besse (1683–1757) was a schoolmaster of Colchester and afterward of London, a Friend of the second generation who had himself been imprisoned in his youth for refusing tithes. For nearly twenty years he labored over the documents the Quakers had preserved from the first — the accounts of every distraint, imprisonment, and abuse gathered into the volumes known as the “Great Book of Sufferings,” kept by the Meeting for Sufferings in London. Out of that vast archive he compiled and arranged the whole. The finished work appeared in 1753 in two great folio volumes — some fifteen hundred pages — covering every county of England and Wales, together with Scotland, Ireland, and the Quaker settlements abroad. It remains, to this day, the single most important source for the history of Quaker persecution.

The persecution Besse records was not, for the most part, a matter of dramatic burnings at the stake. It was something more grinding and relentless: the slow confiscation of a people’s livelihood and liberty under color of law. Friends were fined and imprisoned for refusing to swear oaths, for declining to pay tithes, for meeting together to worship, for keeping their hats on before magistrates, and for the plain speech of thee and thou. When they would not pay, the officers carried off their goods — their cattle, their corn, their kettles and bedding, the very tools of their trades — often to a value many times the sum demanded. Besse sets it all down with a restraint that is itself a kind of eloquence: the date, the name, the offense charged, the penalty exacted. The cumulative effect is overwhelming, and the very monotony of the catalogue becomes its argument.

This first volume opens the collection. It contains Besse’s own Introduction, in which he lays out the chief grounds on which Friends suffered, followed by the sufferings in Bedfordshire, where Friends endured the same jail that held John Bunyan; Berkshire, with its long and heavily documented record at Reading; Bristol, the great western port where the persecution reached a ferocity matched in few other places in England; and Buckinghamshire, home county of the Peningtons. Later volumes will carry the record onward through the remaining counties.

This edition gently modernizes Besse’s eighteenth-century prose for present-day readers: archaic spellings and the longest run-on sentences eased for clarity, while his voice and terms are kept intact. The plain speech of thee and thou has been preserved in the quoted examinations and letters, where it belongs, for it was a testimony the first Friends suffered for. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the persons and places named linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Besse’s record to the history beneath it. Read it slowly. Each entry is a life — and the very weight of the catalogue is the witness.