Memoirs of William Crouch
William Crouch was not a travelling minister, a controversialist, or a gentleman. He was a London upholsterer who kept shop in Finch Lane and later in Gracechurch Street, joined the people called Quakers in 1656, and stayed with them for the rest of a long life. He came up from a Hampshire village at eighteen to be apprenticed in Cornhill, a serious young man who wrote down what the best preachers said and went home to pray alone, and who felt no power over himself for all of it. Then Truth came to London, and he was in the room. He spent close to two years in the Poultry Compter rather than pay a parish rate he believed was tithe under another name, and wrote nine queries on tithes to the priest who had him gaoled. He lay in the Gatehouse at Westminster while the plague killed prisoners around him. He watched his house burn in the Great Fire. For more than forty years informers and parish priests carried off his goods. He also did something quieter and more valuable: he kept the record. It is Crouch who preserved the account of the fifty-five Friends sentenced to banishment and put aboard the Black Eagle, twenty-seven of whom died before the ship ever cleared the Downs. Published after his death in 1712, his memoirs are one of the plainest and most trustworthy accounts we have of how Quakerism took root in the City of London — written by a tradesman who was there, who names the streets and the houses, and who says so plainly where his memory is uncertain.
- Fully modernized English — every long sentence broken, every inversion untangled
- Editorial introduction placing his convincement, his imprisonments, and his City in context
- 12 chapters with date ranges, plus a full linked table of contents
- His own account, with Richard Claridge's 1712 preface and the letters from the Poultry Compter
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2.4 hours
- Length34,623 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2.4 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 2.4 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 1.9 hours to 3.3 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 32,463 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 2,160 words |
| Total | 34,623 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 2,160 of the 34,623 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
1.9 hours and 3.3 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2.4 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 99–138 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
He was born, by his own best reckoning, on the fifth day of the second month — “called April” — in 1628, at Penton, a small village by Weyhill near Andover in Hampshire. His father was a substantial yeoman, well liked by his neighbours, who died in the prime of his years and left young children. His mother kept company with the Puritans, gathered her children to kneel with her in prayer, and watched over their words and actions. The civil wars and the family’s frequent moves cost the boy most of the schooling he might otherwise have had. Richard Claridge, who wrote the preface to this book, says frankly that Crouch was unacquainted with human arts and languages. The reader will find no Latin in Crouch’s part of it.
In 1646 he came up to London and bound himself apprentice in Cornhill, near the Old Exchange. When his time was out he set up for himself in Spread-Eagle Court in Finch Lane, in the parish of St. Bennet Fink.
A serious young man with no power over himself
He describes what he was before: a sermon-hearer who wrote down what the most esteemed preachers said, went home, and prayed alone. He was in earnest. It did him no good. He had no power over himself, and had not yet understood that the God he was looking for was so near.
Then, in the middle 1650s, the northern Friends reached London, and Crouch heard the testimony of Truth declared for himself. “It was to my outward ear,” he wrote, “like a very lovely song.” He was convinced in 1656 and did not look back.
The record-keeper
What makes this book worth reading three and a half centuries later is not that Crouch suffered — a great many Friends suffered more — but that he wrote it down, and wrote it down carefully.
He gives the meetings as they were first set up and where they met: the Bull and Mouth, Sarah Yates’s in Aldersgate Street, Humphrey Bache’s the goldsmith’s, the Peel meeting in John’s Street, the house of William Woodcock in the Savoy, and the rest, from White Cross Street to Horsleydown, Stepney and Westminster. He copies out the warrant from the king and council to the governor of Jamaica. He gives the letters he exchanged with Samuel Clark, the priest of his own parish, from a debtors’ prison. And he gathers from Degory Marshall, one of the banished, the narrative of the Black Eagle — the ship that lay at anchor in Bugby’s Hole with its red-coat guard while twenty-seven of fifty-five banished Friends died aboard, before she ever reached the open sea.
Where his memory is uncertain, he says so. That habit is rarer than it should be in the literature, and it is why historians have trusted him.
Prison, plague, and fire
The parish of St. Bennet Fink obtained Crouch’s bond to collect the scavengers’ roll, and used it. He went to the Poultry Compter and stayed close to two years, paying threepence a night for his lodging in gaol, rather than concede that a parish rate for the minister’s maintenance was anything but tithe by another name.
He was in the Gatehouse at Westminster during the plague year. His house burned in the Great Fire of 1666, and he rebuilt. Under the Conventicle Acts the informers came, and kept coming: in 1684 Thomas Jenner, the recorder of London and by Crouch’s account a notorious encourager of informers, signed a warrant to levy ten pounds on his goods for a single meeting in Gracechurch Street.
He lived to see the Toleration Act, and died on the thirteenth of the eleventh month, 1710, in his eighty-third year. The book came out two years later.
About this edition
The text has been fully modernized: long sentences broken, inversions untangled, obsolete constructions rewritten — but his voice kept, along with the Quaker usage that carries the meaning. First-day and Second-day remain, with the modern day bracketed at first use; the numbered months remain; Truth, Friends, Convincement and the Seed remain. An editorial introduction sets his life in its City, and every chapter carries its date range in a full linked table of contents.
