The Life of Christopher Story
Christopher Story was born at Righead in the parish of Kirklinton in Cumberland, six miles from Carlisle and nearly as far from the Scottish border, and he died in the same house seventy-two years later. He wrote this account so that later generations would know the way and manner in which Truth first broke in upon that barren country. Convinced under the preaching of John Wilkinson at a meeting at Langtown, he became the leading Friend of a district where there had been no meeting at all, and the book is one of the few first-hand records of how meetings were gathered on the Border. It sets down the informer Gilbert Atkinson and the spoiling of Friends' goods for tithes, the meeting-house built against the petition of the parish priest, and the subpoenas obtained from Judge Jeffreys that required sixteen Friends to appear at London. He travelled to Aberdeen, where he found the men Friends imprisoned nearly two years; to Swarthmoor to see George Fox; through Westmorland and the dales of Yorkshire; twice into Ireland; to Bristol and the west of England; and through Scotland in the famine winter of 1698. This edition gathers the life with the testimonies of his wife Bridget Story and of Aaron Atkinson, his epistle to Friends, his paper to the priest of Canonsby, Robert Latimer's conclusion, and the letters he wrote home while away on Truth's service.
- Fully modernized English — every long sentence broken, every inversion untangled
- 1,562-word editorial introduction placing the Border ministry in context
- 13 chapters plus a full linked table of contents
- The testimonies of Bridget Story and Aaron Atkinson, and his letters home
- 131 linked Scripture and reference notes throughout
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.8 hours
- Length25,540 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.8 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 1.8 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 1.4 hours to 2.4 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 23,999 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,541 words |
| Total | 25,540 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,541 of the 25,540 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
1.4 hours and 2.4 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.8 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 73–102 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.
- Secure checkout by Stripe
- Instant download
- 7-day money-back guarantee
About This Edition
He was born at Righead, in the parish of Kirklinton in Cumberland, at the beginning of the fourth month of 1648, and he died in the same house seventy-two years later. Righead stands six miles from Carlisle and nearly as far from the Scottish border, and when Story was a young man there was no meeting of Friends anywhere near it.
The coming of Truth into a barren country
He heard, late on a First-day morning, that a meeting had been appointed at Langtown three miles off, and he set out in haste. The Friend preaching was John Wilkinson, once an Independent preacher. What followed is the part of the book that cannot be got anywhere else: not the doctrine, but the thing itself — a handful of convinced neighbours sitting together in silence with nobody among them able to speak words, the arguing and the searching of Scriptures, the long uncertainty about whether anything had begun at all.
Story wrote the account down, he says, so that later generations would know the way and manner in which Truth first broke in upon that country.
Informers, warrants, and a meeting-house
What the Border cost Friends is set down plainly: the informer Gilbert Atkinson, the spoiling of goods for tithes, the meeting-house built against the parish priest’s petition, and the subpoenas obtained from Judge Jeffreys requiring sixteen Friends to appear at London.
The care of the churches
He travelled to Aberdeen, where he found the men Friends imprisoned nearly two years; to Swarthmoor to see George Fox; through Westmorland and the dales of Yorkshire; twice into Ireland; to Bristol and the west of England; and through Scotland in the famine winter of 1698. His epistle to Friends and his paper to the priest of Canonsby are gathered here, with Robert Latimer’s conclusion.
The letters at the end are the quietest thing in the volume: written home to his wife Bridget from wherever the service had taken him, they are the record of what that travelling cost a household.
About this edition
Every sentence has been rebuilt for a modern reader. His vocabulary of conviction — Truth, the Seed, First-day, the numbered months — is bracketed on first use and then left alone, because translating it would translate him out of the book. One hundred and thirty-one Scripture and reference links are set into the text; every Scripture reference was checked against the King James text rather than recalled, and every person and place link was checked by hand and verified to resolve.
