Quakers took their name from a magistrate's insult in 1650
Hauled before magistrates on a blasphemy charge in 1650, George Fox told them to tremble at the word of the Lord. One of them, Gervase Bennet, mockingly called Fox and his followers Quakers. The jibe stuck, and the movement eventually adopted it, although members still prefer to call each other Friends.
Fox was a restless young man in England torn by civil war, dissatisfied with both the established church and its dissenting rivals. In 1647 in Mansfield he became convinced people could experience Christ directly, without ordained clergy, and in 1652 a vision on Pendle Hill in Lancashire sent him preaching across England, the Netherlands and Barbados. Travelling preachers known as the Valiant Sixty, some of them women, spread the message that Christ had come to teach his people himself.
It caught on fast, particularly among women. In May 1659 more than 7000 women signed a petition to Parliament against compulsory tithes. By 1680 England and Wales held around 60,000 Quakers, about 1.15 percent of the population, despite persecution under laws passed in 1662 and 1664 that ended only with the Act of Toleration in 1689. Fox and Margaret Fell reshaped ideas of household and community, giving women formal responsibility through their own meetings.
Friends became known for plain dress, abstaining from alcohol, and refusing to swear oaths or fight. They opposed slavery and pushed prison reform. Quaker families founded the banks Barclays and Lloyds, the shoemaker Clarks and all three of Britain's big chocolate makers, Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry. In 1947 the British and American Quaker service bodies jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today the movement looks very different from its English roots. Of an estimated 377,557 adult Quakers in 2017, 49 percent lived in Africa and 22 percent in North America. Only about 11 percent still worship in the original way, gathering in silence until someone feels moved to speak. Around 40 percent belong to evangelical churches with pastors, hymns and sermons, a style that grew up in 19th-century America and now dominates in Africa.
Source: Quakers
