The Faithful Testimony of William Dewsbury: His Life, Epistles and Writings
The collected life and writings of William Dewsbury (c. 1621–1688), one of the Valiant Sixty and a founder of the People Called Quakers. A Yorkshire farm servant turned soldier turned prophet, Dewsbury spent nearly thirty years in the gaols of Northampton, York, and Warwick — and from those cells sent out a body of fiery prophetic tracts and tender pastoral letters that read not as a captive's complaints but as the joy of a man who called his prison a palace. Modernized for present-day readers with linked scripture and historical references.
- His life, early prophetic tracts, and pastoral epistles in twenty-three sections
- The prison writings of one of the Valiant Sixty, written from the gaols of Northampton, York, and Warwick
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read6 hours
- Length85,741 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 6 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 6 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 4.8 hours to 8.2 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 80,323 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 5,418 words |
| Total | 85,741 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 5,418 of the 85,741 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
4.8 hours and 8.2 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 6 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 245–343 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
Some men are remembered for the journeys they made; William Dewsbury is remembered for the place he could not leave. For the better part of thirty years he was a prisoner, shut up in the common gaols of Northampton, York, and Warwick for no crime but the faith he would not deny. And yet the writings he sent out from behind those walls do not read like the complaints of a captive. They read like the letters of a man who has found, in the narrowest of rooms, the widest of horizons. He called his prison a palace. He counted his chains a privilege.
Dewsbury was born about the year 1621 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, of plain country stock, and went out young into the world as a farm servant. A serious and seeking soul from boyhood, he searched through the whole landscape of Puritan England and found rest in none of it. When the civil wars came he took up arms in the Parliamentary army, hoping to see the kingdom of God advanced by the sword — and laid his weapons down again, convinced that the only warfare worth the name was the inward one, the Lamb’s War waged not against men but against sin in the soul. His long seeking ended where so many others ended in those years: in the message that swept out of the north of England in the early 1650s, when he was “convinced” — the word Friends used for that decisive turning. From that hour he gave the rest of his life to proclaiming the Light of Christ shining inwardly in the conscience, becoming one of the first generation of traveling ministers later remembered as the Valiant Sixty.
This Friends Illuminated edition gathers the testimony of his friends concerning his life and death, his early prophetic tracts — including his word to Oliver Cromwell, his answer to John Timson, and his searching “Discovery of Mystery Babylon” — and the great body of tender pastoral letters he wrote across decades of imprisonment, down to the closing scenes of his death at London in 1688. The text is gently modernized for present-day readers, with his fiery prophetic voice preserved, the plain speech of thee and thou kept where it carries his testimony, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.
