Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Fox, George" to "France" / Volume 10, Slice 7

Articles in This Slice

FOX, GEORGE (1624-1691), the founder of the “Society of Friends” or “Quakers,” was born at Drayton, Leicestershire, in July 1624. His father, Christopher Fox, called by the neighbours “Righteous Christer,” was a weaver by occupation; and his mother, Mary Lago, “an upright woman and accomplished above most of her degree,” was “of the stock of the martyrs.” George from his childhood “appeared of another frame than the rest of his brethren, being more religious, inward, still, solid and observing beyond his years”; and he himself declares: “When I came to eleven years of age I knew pureness and righteousness; for while a child I was taught how to walk to be kept pure.” Some of his relations wished that he should be educated for the ministry; but his father apprenticed him to a shoemaker, who also dealt in wool and cattle. In this service he remained till his nineteenth year. According to Penn, “he took most delight in sheep,” but he himself simply says: “A good deal went through my hands.... People had generally a love to me for my innocency and honesty.” In 1643, being upon business at a fair, and having accompanied some friends to the village public-house, he was troubled by a proposal to “drink healths,” and withdrew in grief of spirit. “When I had done what business I had to do I returned home, but did not go to bed that night, nor could I sleep, but sometimes walked up and down, and sometimes prayed and cried to the Lord, who said unto me, ‘Thou seest how young people go together into vanity and old people into the earth; thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all.’ Then, at the command of God, on the ninth day of the seventh month, 1643, I left my relations and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with old or young.”
Thus briefly he describes what appears to have been the greatest moral crisis in his life. The four years which followed were a time of great perplexity and distress, though sometimes “I had intermissions, and was sometimes brought into such a heavenly joy that I thought I had been in Abraham’s bosom.” He would go from town to town, “travelling up and down as a stranger in the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes a month, more or less, in a place”; and the reason he gives for this migratory habit is that he was “afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, he should be hurt by conversing much with either.” The same fear often led him to shun all society for days at a time; but frequently he would apply to “professors” for spiritual direction and consolation. These applications, however, never proved successful; he invariably found that his advisers “possessed not what they professed.” Some recommended marriage, others enlistment as a soldier in the civil wars; one “ancient priest” bade him take tobacco and sing psalms; another of the same fraternity, “in high account,” advised physic and blood-letting.