| Description | The first record of there being Friends in Warwick is of George Fox's (1624-1691) visit to the town in 1655 with the Quakers John Crook, Amor Stodart and Gerard Roberts, when he held a well-attended meeting at a widow's house. However, they were met with hostility by some of the town's inhabitants and were chased out of Warwick. Fox held another meeting there in the following year, and it is likely that Warwick Meeting was established following this visit.
Throughout this initial period, the Quakers met with considerable persecution. In 1658 a Quaker was recorded as being imprisoned and in 1660, several Quakers had their shop windows broken and their stock damaged because they had opened their shops on Christmas Day. At this time, Quakers did not celebrate any religious holy days because they considered all days were holy days. In the following year, 140 Quakers were imprisoned in Warwick gaol, and between 20 and 40 were imprisoned in 1666. In this year, and in 1667, Quaker prisoners were visited by Fox. He made his last visit to the town in 1680, when he met the Quaker minister William Dewsbury (c.1621–1688). Yorkshire born, Dewsbury was a charismatic preacher and writer who converted to Quakerism after meeting Fox in 1651, and became a minister the following year. He was a strong advocate of the Quaker movement and travelled around the country preaching, and was arrested many times, spending a total of twenty years in gaol. From 1664-1672 and 1679-1686 he was imprisoned at Warwick. He died in 1688 and is buried in the meeting house burial ground.
In 1671, a site in the High Street, with a house and a garden which had been used as a burial ground for the previous 11 years, was bought from Edward Tustian, and a meeting house was later built. This building was destroyed by the Great Fire of Warwick in 1694, and another meeting house was built in the same location in 1695. In 1706, meetings in houses at Barford and Charlecote were also recorded at Quarter Sessions, and it is assumed that these were subsidiaries of Warwick Meeting.
By 1689, there were at least 86 members who came from Warwick itself and from surrounding villages such as Tachbrook, Budbrook, Lillington, Kenilworth, Radford Harbury, Leamington Priors and Southam. In the 18th century, over half of members came from outside Warwick and were farmers working their own freehold plots, millers or traders. It is thought that at this time membership was only slightly lower than that of Coventry Preparative Meeting which had 250-300 members, and although numbers declined in the second half of the 18th century, with some families emigrating to Pennsylvania, and others being disowned for marrying non-Quakers, it still remained a substantial meeting until the early 19th century. From then on however, membership declined rapidly down to only two or three members and the meeting was absorbed into Coventry meeting from 1834 and in 1909 the meeting house was closed. It was re-opened in 1949 for use during the summer by Leamington Preparative Meeting, which then became the Leamington and Warwick Preparative Meeting in 1949, and was subsequently renamed Warwick Preparative Meeting in 1962. For records since 1949, see SF/3/30.
Ministers of note include John Hands, John Adkins and Elizabeth Lancester.
See SF/3 for a description of the functions of the Local/Preparative Meeting. |