A Short Account of the Life and Religious Labours of Patience Brayton
Patience Brayton of Swansea, Massachusetts (1733–1794) was a minister among Friends who, with her husband, manumitted the slaves of their own household before she rode south in 1771 to sit with slaveholding Friends in Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Twelve years later she crossed the Atlantic and stayed four years, working the meetings of Ireland, the north of England, Wales, the west country, and Scotland as far as Aberdeen, and taking part in the Friends' Address to King George the Third. Drawn mostly from her own minutes and first printed in 1801, this Short Account is a travel diary of the plainest kind — where she rode, whom she sat with, which meetings were open and which were shut. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Rhode Island to Georgia in 1771–72, to sit with slaveholding Friends face to face
- Four years travelling Britain and Ireland, and a hand in the Address to King George III
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2.9 hours
- Length41,619 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2.9 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 2.9 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 2.3 hours to 4 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 37,455 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 4,164 words |
| Total | 41,619 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 4,164 of the 41,619 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
2.3 hours and 4 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2.9 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 119–166 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Patience Brayton was born on the eighteenth of the Eleventh month, 1733, at North Kingstown, Rhode Island, the daughter of David and Mary Greene. In 1758 she married Preserved Brayton and settled at Swansea, in Bristol County, Massachusetts, where she remained a member of Swansea Monthly Meeting for the rest of her life. She came into the ministry, and in 1771 she set out southward.
That journey is the moral centre of the book, and she never once explains it. She rode through Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, down into Maryland at Choptank, West River, and Bush River, on through the Carolinas into Georgia, and back through Virginia to the Jerseys — the same road John Woolman had ridden, into the same houses, on the same errand. She had put her own household in order first. What the account records is not argument but presence: a New England woman sitting in the parlours and meeting houses of Friends who held slaves, staying long enough to be understood.
In 1783 she crossed the Atlantic, and she did not come home until 1787. Ireland, Dublin, Liverpool, the north of England, Wales and the west country as far as Cornwall, Norwich, Newcastle, Yorkshire, Scotland by Aberdeen and Montrose, then Godalming, Poole, Gloucester, the midland meetings, Norfolk, Essex, and London. Before she sailed she was among the Friends who carried an Address to King George the Third. She died in 1794 and was buried at Somerset; the testimony of Swansea Monthly Meeting concerning her closes the volume.
She wrote for herself, in short entries, at the end of long days, and the original printing is correspondingly compressed. This edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation, lightens the archaic verb forms, and divides the longest sentences, without flattening her voice or smoothing over what she declined to say. The letters she wrote and received are treated differently: they are set apart on the page and left in their own language, with only the obvious damage of old printing repaired.
Friends’ dating by numbered months has been kept, with the modern month supplied in brackets. Scripture references have been identified and linked to the King James text, and the persons and places she names — the meetings, the ports, the market towns of four countries — linked to encyclopedic articles, so that a reader can follow the route as she rode it.
