Local Friends Then

George Fox and the early Quakers passed through
Northumberland many times in the 1650s and the years
that followed. Quaker meetings were established several
centuries ago in Allendale, Coanwood, Winnowshill in
Derwentside, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Alnwick.

	Robert Foster, member of the Society of Friends, attending Brigflatts meeting in naval uniform, to the consternation of Friends.

Alnwick Quaker Meeting

In the early days, Quakers were persecuted. In 1662, Ellen Hebron of Old Bewick was presented at the Court of the Archdeacon of Alnwick Abbey. In 1681, Edmund Craster was dragged before the court sessions on a charge of holding a Quaker meeting in his house in Alnwick.

A few years later a certain John Gratton, ‘being abroad in truth’s service,’ wanted to have a meeting in Alnwick. Among those he convinced by his powerful ministry was a teenage boy, Abraham Marshall. In 1697 Marshall emigrated to Pennsylvania, the new colony in America founded by the British Quaker William Penn, which allowed religious toleration. Marshall died in 1767 and a memorial mentioning Alnwick was erected at Bradford Meeting House in Chester County, PA.

In the early 18th Century, John Doubleday, the owner of Alnwick Abbey tried to propagate Quakerism. He let Quakers meet at his house and he offered hospitality to strangers, travellers and the poor. The abbey stood a small distance from the castle, in view of the church and under a hill, by the Aln.

Today the only remains are a gateway and tower. Doubleday gave a plot of ground by the river on the west side and at the foot of Canongate for a Quaker burial plot.

Embleton Quaker Meeting

1681, in the month called January, John Turnball and Thomas Wake, taken from a meeting in Embleton, were, by order of Henry Ogle and Thomas Collingwood, Justices, sent to prison at Newcastle.

There are some details of the Embleton meeting after the Toleration Act of 1689. A meeting house was built in 1720 but not many Quakers worshipped there, according to Bishop Chandler, who visited in 1736 and remarked: ’10 Quakers, house, but seldom meet.’ In 1747 Embleton Quakers contributed £1 towards losses sustained by Friends in the northern and middle of England and Scotland during the Jacobite rebellion.

By 1759 Embleton had ceased to be a monthly meeting and the meeting house and its stable was sold in 1785 for £30. The graveyard was kept for Friends burials. This is now under a paddock behind Quaker Row. A long-term resident of Embleton, whose father was the local undertaker, remembers the burial ground being in the family’s garden.

Berwick, Northumberland, USA – Quaker Town

In the mid-18th century there was emigration from Berwick-upon-Tweed for those with no chance of an income in their home town. One émigré was Evan Owen, a convinced Quaker, who went to Philadelphia where he met other Quakers who were settling in Pennsylvania.

He was among the first to purchase land at low cost from the land office opened by William Penn and he bought 313 acres on the banks of the Susquehanna River, in an area which had been heavily populated by American Indians. Remembering his home town, Owen named the new settlement Berwick, in Northumberland County.