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The Quakers and the english revolution
Reviews and Book Notes
87
chapters are much more relevant and the best in the book. ‘The Pearl poet’ shows clearly how closely these poems follow the biblical account, expanding it imaginatively when Jonah is inside the whale’s belly and suggesting Belshazzar’s delight in his own wickedness as the motivation for his great feast, a feast of the damned graced by the single clean man, Daniel, just as the rich man’s feast at the beginning of Cleanness is that of the chosen and marred by one unclean guest. The theological discussion of Pearl, which at first might seem excessive for an elegy, in fact produces the emotional reconciliation between father-dreamer and daughter. Those who know Professor Fowler’s earlier work will not be surprised that the final chapter is a sensitive discussion of ‘Piers the Plowman as History’, an aspect of the poem which has certainly not been given full and proper emphasis. But history depends on dates and those given here are not (as Fowler readily admits since his interpretation depends on it) those commonly accepted, especially for B. He envisages dual authorship, the A-text by one man and completed before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and the B- and C-texts by another, with B perhaps begun c. 1378 but finished only after the Revolt, in 1383. The A-text, concerned for the plight of labourers but not idealising them, expresses ‘the ideology that provided the foundation’ for the Revolt. Odd phrases from the poem were indeed used as rallying cries, but it seems unlikely that the rebels had any conception-however misguided-of the whole poem. The B-continuation, according to Fowler, shows its reviser’s horrified reaction to the violence of 1381. He therefore modified A’s anti-intellectual and anticlerical views, produced a more reasoned criticism of the friars and (an interesting suggestion) modified the roles of Piers and the Dreamer. In B, Piers is removed from centre stage and becomes a symbol of the poet’s ideal Christian life, while the Dreamer’s allegorical questioners and no longer the Dreamer himself often express the poet’s own views. All this is persuasive but far from convincing, mainly because sufficient corroborative detail is not (cannot be?) given; in particular we are informed that B’s references to the Revolt are ‘encoded’ and their interpretation here seems forced. Other suggestions are ingenious. Truth promises a pardon to those who really have no need of a pardon, so a poena and a culpa is not excessive so much as ironic. The ending of A is contrived, rather than (as usually thought) the result of Langland’s confused theology. The B-continuation proceeds, like the drama, from Genesis (passus xi) via patriarchs, prophets, the life, Passion and Resurrection of Christ to the coming of Antichrist and the threat of Doom (xix-xx); the poem is then indeed ‘an extension of the Bible’. This book is the culmination of a lifetime’s interest in the Bible and its influence on Middle English literature. It contains several illuminating, occasionally provocative remarks. But it is ‘influence’ of a general sort, mostly of course from the Vulgate. (Could it sometimes be from the Liturgy or even from the Wycliffite translation? We are seldom told.) When the author quotes the apparent contradiction between Mark xvi 16 and Psalm xxiv 3-4 as the genesis of the problem of the salvation of the righteous heathen, he produces a source. When he talks of the poet of Piers Plowman crying like Amos for justice in the gate, he is citing a parallel, S. S. HUSSEY liniversily of Lancaster Barry Smith,
Reay, The Quakers and the English 1985, pp. 184 + xii. 212.95.
Revolution.
London,
Temple
88
Reviews and Book Notes
This is a brisk, efficient, clear and readable book about important aspects of the 1650s and 60s. It is too short to do justice to some of its themes and shows distinct signs of being written, if not researched, hurriedly, without sufficient checking of material, perhaps by friendly colleagues, so as to avoid repetitions. Reay approaches his subject a little detachedly, not being in the tradition of Quakercentric historiography. This helps him all the more readily to locate the origins of the Society of Friends in the ‘world turned upside down’ of the 165Osrather than in the internal rythms of ‘religious history’. He is, however, unfair to two empathetic historians of Quakerism, Barbour and Nuttall, in claiming that a sole ‘concern with the spiritual rather than the social’ permeates their work. This, though, is only the fairly harmless practice of advertising one’s wares by dumping knocking copy on one’s predecessors. Amongst the snarks hunted by Reay is George Fox. The issue here for historians of Quakerism is the familiar one of Great Man versus rank and file. One careless adjective-Fox as ‘the acknowledged founder of the movement’-and the reader’s worst fears are aroused that we are about to be treated to a re-run of Fox the lone creative genius. Not so. Dr Reay has been too well brought up, perhaps by Christopher Hill who contributes a forward to the volume, to forget that movements are made by masses. If anything, then, Reay downgrades Fox in favour of an image of collective leadership the rest of whose members Fox out-ranked by out-living them. In this Reay overlooks the fact that longevity can itself be an act of will, and that in any case Fox imposed himself on the movement not through survival alone but through a combination of energy, travel, bullying and organisational as well as spiritual prowess. Another old chestnut for students of early Quakerism is the emergence of the peace testimony. Clearly, some people cannot for the life of them see how a movement can be revolutionary without being violently revolutionary. Cole, with his ‘Pacificism was not a characteristic of the early Quakers’, did not help matters much, since pacificism clearly was a characteristic, apparent in Fox himself as early as 1650. Reay gets bogged down. He cites Fox’ complaint that some ‘Quakers’ foolish rash spirits’ took up arms as evidence of revolutionary militancy: it is just as much evidence that the leadership successfully dismissed the militants as an antiparty faction. Similarly, with Burrough’s kind offer to lay down Quaker lives for the Good Old Cause, there is all the difference between laying down lives and taking up arms. In the end, perhaps with the aid of the perceptive remark by Tolles-‘there is no such thing as a Quaker attitude’ [to politics]-Reay hits about the right note with regard to the peace issue: ‘Quaker always believed that the ultimate battle was spiritual’. In an important and fascinating chapter, Reay discusses and analyses popular hostility to Quakers. He considers the roots of this hostility in village xenophobia, superstition and class enmity. But either the chapter is too short to complete the discussion, or Reay is too mesmerised by the image of the first Friends as deviants, for he seems to forget that they were also proponents of the culture of godliness (which he discusses skillfully in his last chapter) so hated by the lumpenproletariat, as John Walsh’s Wesleyan missionaries were to find a century or so after the early Quakers. This chapter and Reay’s chapter 5, on the Quakers and 1659, offer to a wider audience than the readership of learned journals the opportunity to examine the author’s stimulating thoughts on the way Quakers were the spearhead of an aborted radical revolution in the late 1650s one whose real effect was to create a backlash
Reviews and Book Notes
89
whose beneficiaries were the Stuart monarchy and the Anglican Church. We read of the fatal divisions amongst the godly, with even Baptists preferring the Stuarts to the Quakers; we learn of the trahison dcs presbyteiicns and of how these guardians of the orthodox Calvinist tradition, in their fear of toleration and its consequences, brought down upon themselves the terrible nemesis of the years after 1660; we see also, however, how at least some of the features of the Clarendon Code were already apparent in England in the late 1650s and we are once again convinced that the Restoration must be dated back to at least 1658. Apart from the well trod avenues of Fox and his personal contribution, and the inception of Quaker pacificism, writers on Quaker history also like to wander around the topic of the deterioration of the Society of Friends. Both the main schools of thought are pessimist: Quakerism definitely went to the bad. The ultra-pessimiststhose who believe that hardly had Quakerism been born than it went to the dogssubscribe to the view that persecution is bad for religious bodies because it leads to organisation, formalism, all that sort of thing. The moderate pessimists-those who think that the Society declined after 168~incline to the opinion that toleration is bad for religions, in that it encourages ‘bourgeois merchants’, the rise of capitalism. ease, affluence and all those other evils that we can never forgive our ancestors for pursuing. Reay belongs to both schools of thought: the rot set in gradually from 1660 to 1700. There is little awareness of his part of the continuance of mission, and of persecution, into the 18th century, or of the fact that, as the long-running Affirmations controversy indicates, there were alternatives to the leadership of the grey-clad importants of Bristol and London. The besetting sin of this book is the tendency to make anecdotes do double or multiple duty. This must be the new frugalism at work: good housekeeping even with data. One could lose count how often Monck dismisses Quakers from the Army of Scotland, always, though, most economically proving something or other. Robert Lilburne’s mutinous regiment keeps popping up, Justice Fell protects Quakers with commendable regularity, the former music master turned Quaker Solomon Eccles ignites and re-ignites bonfires of his musical instruments. There is some carelessness, as seen above, with words: the antique (and Quakerish) ‘deny’ for ‘repudiate’, ‘Unwilling’ when the meaning is ‘compulsory’; the Friends certainly didn’t ‘appropriate’ ‘Quaker’ and one doubts now if they ever will. There are some delightful phrases. Nayler’s adherents would certainly have accepted ‘The Passion of Nayler’; in the discussion of somnolence in 18th century meetings, it is only slightly inexcusable to write that ‘The Seekers had become sleepers.’ Less happy is the evening-surgery descripton of Fox’s early problems: ‘the usual puritan doubts and despairs’. Keep taking the tablets? MICHAEL MULLETT University of Lancaster
Diane Choquette, A Critical
New Religious Movements in the United States and Canada. Assessment and Annotated Bibliography, London, Greenwood Press,
1985, pp. xi + 235. E39.95. The study of new religious movements has progressed by leaps and bounds during the last decade or so. But enter a decent library and it is soon apparent that literature is hard to track down. Books are classified in different subject categories; articles are
87
chapters are much more relevant and the best in the book. ‘The Pearl poet’ shows clearly how closely these poems follow the biblical account, expanding it imaginatively when Jonah is inside the whale’s belly and suggesting Belshazzar’s delight in his own wickedness as the motivation for his great feast, a feast of the damned graced by the single clean man, Daniel, just as the rich man’s feast at the beginning of Cleanness is that of the chosen and marred by one unclean guest. The theological discussion of Pearl, which at first might seem excessive for an elegy, in fact produces the emotional reconciliation between father-dreamer and daughter. Those who know Professor Fowler’s earlier work will not be surprised that the final chapter is a sensitive discussion of ‘Piers the Plowman as History’, an aspect of the poem which has certainly not been given full and proper emphasis. But history depends on dates and those given here are not (as Fowler readily admits since his interpretation depends on it) those commonly accepted, especially for B. He envisages dual authorship, the A-text by one man and completed before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and the B- and C-texts by another, with B perhaps begun c. 1378 but finished only after the Revolt, in 1383. The A-text, concerned for the plight of labourers but not idealising them, expresses ‘the ideology that provided the foundation’ for the Revolt. Odd phrases from the poem were indeed used as rallying cries, but it seems unlikely that the rebels had any conception-however misguided-of the whole poem. The B-continuation, according to Fowler, shows its reviser’s horrified reaction to the violence of 1381. He therefore modified A’s anti-intellectual and anticlerical views, produced a more reasoned criticism of the friars and (an interesting suggestion) modified the roles of Piers and the Dreamer. In B, Piers is removed from centre stage and becomes a symbol of the poet’s ideal Christian life, while the Dreamer’s allegorical questioners and no longer the Dreamer himself often express the poet’s own views. All this is persuasive but far from convincing, mainly because sufficient corroborative detail is not (cannot be?) given; in particular we are informed that B’s references to the Revolt are ‘encoded’ and their interpretation here seems forced. Other suggestions are ingenious. Truth promises a pardon to those who really have no need of a pardon, so a poena and a culpa is not excessive so much as ironic. The ending of A is contrived, rather than (as usually thought) the result of Langland’s confused theology. The B-continuation proceeds, like the drama, from Genesis (passus xi) via patriarchs, prophets, the life, Passion and Resurrection of Christ to the coming of Antichrist and the threat of Doom (xix-xx); the poem is then indeed ‘an extension of the Bible’. This book is the culmination of a lifetime’s interest in the Bible and its influence on Middle English literature. It contains several illuminating, occasionally provocative remarks. But it is ‘influence’ of a general sort, mostly of course from the Vulgate. (Could it sometimes be from the Liturgy or even from the Wycliffite translation? We are seldom told.) When the author quotes the apparent contradiction between Mark xvi 16 and Psalm xxiv 3-4 as the genesis of the problem of the salvation of the righteous heathen, he produces a source. When he talks of the poet of Piers Plowman crying like Amos for justice in the gate, he is citing a parallel, S. S. HUSSEY liniversily of Lancaster Barry Smith,
Reay, The Quakers and the English 1985, pp. 184 + xii. 212.95.
Revolution.
London,
Temple
88
Reviews and Book Notes
This is a brisk, efficient, clear and readable book about important aspects of the 1650s and 60s. It is too short to do justice to some of its themes and shows distinct signs of being written, if not researched, hurriedly, without sufficient checking of material, perhaps by friendly colleagues, so as to avoid repetitions. Reay approaches his subject a little detachedly, not being in the tradition of Quakercentric historiography. This helps him all the more readily to locate the origins of the Society of Friends in the ‘world turned upside down’ of the 165Osrather than in the internal rythms of ‘religious history’. He is, however, unfair to two empathetic historians of Quakerism, Barbour and Nuttall, in claiming that a sole ‘concern with the spiritual rather than the social’ permeates their work. This, though, is only the fairly harmless practice of advertising one’s wares by dumping knocking copy on one’s predecessors. Amongst the snarks hunted by Reay is George Fox. The issue here for historians of Quakerism is the familiar one of Great Man versus rank and file. One careless adjective-Fox as ‘the acknowledged founder of the movement’-and the reader’s worst fears are aroused that we are about to be treated to a re-run of Fox the lone creative genius. Not so. Dr Reay has been too well brought up, perhaps by Christopher Hill who contributes a forward to the volume, to forget that movements are made by masses. If anything, then, Reay downgrades Fox in favour of an image of collective leadership the rest of whose members Fox out-ranked by out-living them. In this Reay overlooks the fact that longevity can itself be an act of will, and that in any case Fox imposed himself on the movement not through survival alone but through a combination of energy, travel, bullying and organisational as well as spiritual prowess. Another old chestnut for students of early Quakerism is the emergence of the peace testimony. Clearly, some people cannot for the life of them see how a movement can be revolutionary without being violently revolutionary. Cole, with his ‘Pacificism was not a characteristic of the early Quakers’, did not help matters much, since pacificism clearly was a characteristic, apparent in Fox himself as early as 1650. Reay gets bogged down. He cites Fox’ complaint that some ‘Quakers’ foolish rash spirits’ took up arms as evidence of revolutionary militancy: it is just as much evidence that the leadership successfully dismissed the militants as an antiparty faction. Similarly, with Burrough’s kind offer to lay down Quaker lives for the Good Old Cause, there is all the difference between laying down lives and taking up arms. In the end, perhaps with the aid of the perceptive remark by Tolles-‘there is no such thing as a Quaker attitude’ [to politics]-Reay hits about the right note with regard to the peace issue: ‘Quaker always believed that the ultimate battle was spiritual’. In an important and fascinating chapter, Reay discusses and analyses popular hostility to Quakers. He considers the roots of this hostility in village xenophobia, superstition and class enmity. But either the chapter is too short to complete the discussion, or Reay is too mesmerised by the image of the first Friends as deviants, for he seems to forget that they were also proponents of the culture of godliness (which he discusses skillfully in his last chapter) so hated by the lumpenproletariat, as John Walsh’s Wesleyan missionaries were to find a century or so after the early Quakers. This chapter and Reay’s chapter 5, on the Quakers and 1659, offer to a wider audience than the readership of learned journals the opportunity to examine the author’s stimulating thoughts on the way Quakers were the spearhead of an aborted radical revolution in the late 1650s one whose real effect was to create a backlash
Reviews and Book Notes
89
whose beneficiaries were the Stuart monarchy and the Anglican Church. We read of the fatal divisions amongst the godly, with even Baptists preferring the Stuarts to the Quakers; we learn of the trahison dcs presbyteiicns and of how these guardians of the orthodox Calvinist tradition, in their fear of toleration and its consequences, brought down upon themselves the terrible nemesis of the years after 1660; we see also, however, how at least some of the features of the Clarendon Code were already apparent in England in the late 1650s and we are once again convinced that the Restoration must be dated back to at least 1658. Apart from the well trod avenues of Fox and his personal contribution, and the inception of Quaker pacificism, writers on Quaker history also like to wander around the topic of the deterioration of the Society of Friends. Both the main schools of thought are pessimist: Quakerism definitely went to the bad. The ultra-pessimiststhose who believe that hardly had Quakerism been born than it went to the dogssubscribe to the view that persecution is bad for religious bodies because it leads to organisation, formalism, all that sort of thing. The moderate pessimists-those who think that the Society declined after 168~incline to the opinion that toleration is bad for religions, in that it encourages ‘bourgeois merchants’, the rise of capitalism. ease, affluence and all those other evils that we can never forgive our ancestors for pursuing. Reay belongs to both schools of thought: the rot set in gradually from 1660 to 1700. There is little awareness of his part of the continuance of mission, and of persecution, into the 18th century, or of the fact that, as the long-running Affirmations controversy indicates, there were alternatives to the leadership of the grey-clad importants of Bristol and London. The besetting sin of this book is the tendency to make anecdotes do double or multiple duty. This must be the new frugalism at work: good housekeeping even with data. One could lose count how often Monck dismisses Quakers from the Army of Scotland, always, though, most economically proving something or other. Robert Lilburne’s mutinous regiment keeps popping up, Justice Fell protects Quakers with commendable regularity, the former music master turned Quaker Solomon Eccles ignites and re-ignites bonfires of his musical instruments. There is some carelessness, as seen above, with words: the antique (and Quakerish) ‘deny’ for ‘repudiate’, ‘Unwilling’ when the meaning is ‘compulsory’; the Friends certainly didn’t ‘appropriate’ ‘Quaker’ and one doubts now if they ever will. There are some delightful phrases. Nayler’s adherents would certainly have accepted ‘The Passion of Nayler’; in the discussion of somnolence in 18th century meetings, it is only slightly inexcusable to write that ‘The Seekers had become sleepers.’ Less happy is the evening-surgery descripton of Fox’s early problems: ‘the usual puritan doubts and despairs’. Keep taking the tablets? MICHAEL MULLETT University of Lancaster
Diane Choquette, A Critical
New Religious Movements in the United States and Canada. Assessment and Annotated Bibliography, London, Greenwood Press,
1985, pp. xi + 235. E39.95. The study of new religious movements has progressed by leaps and bounds during the last decade or so. But enter a decent library and it is soon apparent that literature is hard to track down. Books are classified in different subject categories; articles are