Journal of the Life of William Edmundson

William Edmundson was born in Westmorland in 1627 and orphaned young. He went for a soldier as soon as he was old enough, rode under Parliament through the last of the civil wars in England and Scotland, and grew sick enough of the trade to give up his charge and go home. He married a young woman from Derbyshire and crossed to Ireland to set up as a shopkeeper. That should have been the whole of it.

What happened instead is that on a buying trip back to the north of England he went, almost idly, to a meeting of the people called Quakers, and was convinced — along with the two kinsmen who went with him. He returned to Ireland to find there was no one there to talk to. No meeting, no Friend, nobody who had heard of the thing at all. He worshipped in his own house in silence with his wife and his brother; then four more joined; then John Tiffin came over from England, and there was something that could properly be called a meeting. Everything Irish Quakerism became grew out of that room.

For the next sixty years he was almost never at home. The journal records the itinerary in the plain, unhurried way of a man setting down where he had been: Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught, ridden until he knew the roads the way a farmer knows his own fields; the Irish Sea crossed and recrossed; and three voyages to America and the West Indies — Barbadoes, Nevis, Antigua, Jamaica, Rhode Island, New England, Virginia, Maryland, the Carolina wilderness — every one of them paid for out of his own pocket, so that the Gospel might not be chargeable to anyone.

He suffered for it. Fourteen weeks in a close dungeon at Londonderry among felons, where he was nearly stifled. The stocks at Belturbet. Excommunication, and the bishop’s court, and the priest George Clapham of Mountmellick who watched the market to see who dared trade with a Quaker and hauled them before the court until they paid to be let alone. Clapham told his congregation that if they knocked a Quaker on the head the law would bear them out. During the troubles of 1689–91 Edmundson put himself repeatedly between armed men and his neighbours, including neighbours who were no friends of his, and went on doing it until his own house was set on fire and his family driven out of it.

There is a second Edmundson in these pages, and modern readers sometimes find him the harder of the two. Alongside the travelling preacher stands the church-builder who worked with George Fox to settle men’s and women’s meetings, who cared intensely about good order, and who was entirely willing to be unpopular about it. He let no sin pass unreproved and no fault untold. Those who wanted more liberty than he thought Truth allowed reckoned him, in the memorable phrase of the Munster testimony, a burdensome stone. He does not appear to have minded.

The volume closes with the shorter writings: the epistle from Jamaica, the letters from Barbadoes in 1675 and to his wife in 1684, the postscript to Leinster Province Meeting, and a searching essay on offerings to God — a sustained argument that God will not accept what costs the giver nothing, and that a prayer offered out of habit is strange fire on the altar. The three sections of front matter are the testimonies published with the original 1715 edition: the estimates of the Provincial Meetings of Ulster, Leinster and Munster, of Mountmellick Monthly Meeting, and of his friend and travelling companion George Rooke.

George Rooke reports a remark of his that is easy to miss. Edmundson said he was glad when he looked back and considered how he had spent his time since the day the Lord first laid a hand on him: search carefully as he might, he could not find that he was behind with his day’s work. That is the key to the whole book. He was not a subtle theologian and not a literary man — a farmer and former soldier who believed he had been given a piece of work to do, that the time for it was finite, and that the only real disaster would be to reach the end still owing.

This Friends Illuminated edition presents the complete text in modern English, with archaic constructions resolved, scripture references linked, and the people, places and meetings of Edmundson’s Ireland and America identified for the present-day reader.