The Fearless Benjamin Lay

The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

Marcus Rediker

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781786634719
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786634733
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man-a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.

CHAPTER ONE

EARLY LIFE

THE FORMATIVE EARLY influences in Benjamin Lay’s life were family, region, religion, and work. He was born in 1682 to people of modest but growing means in Essex, a part of England known in the seventeenth century for textile production, protest, and religious radicalism. He was a third-generation Quaker and eventually one more fervently dedicated to the faith than either his parents or grandparents. He studied the history of Quakerism and drew inspiration from its origins in the English Revolution. And he had a broad set of work experiences—rural and urban, regional and international—as a shepherd, glove maker, and sailor. How and where Benjamin made his living would shape his evolving view of the world.

COPFORD: COMMONER

Benjamin’s family had lived in the small village of Copford, County Essex, about sixty miles northwest of London, for several generations. Copford was part of the manor of the Bishops of London during the tenth and eleventh centuries, under the rule of England’s later Saxon kings. The bishops held the manor until 1559, when the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, dispossessed Copford’s bishop, Edmund Bonner, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance. The lands of Copford were then offered for private purchase, but local commons remained. The village chapel was known for its twelfth-century Norman wall paintings and for a sheet of flayed human skin—probably that of a poacher—that hung on a door as a dreadful warning. Originally dedicated to St. Mary, the chapel would be renamed St. Michael and All Angels Church, based on the storied clash between good and evil in the Book of Revelation.¹

Benjamin’s grandparents, William and Prudence Lay, possessed modest property in Copford, as revealed by the hearth tax levied in Essex in 1670. “Willelmus Lay” owned a cottage with one fireplace: it was home to himself, his wife, and three children: son William (Benjamin’s father), born 1654; daughter Susan, born 1659; and son John, born 1662. The village itself was small. Only twenty-two households had taxable hearths. One family, obviously the local gentry, had six; two had four; five had three; nine had two; and five, including the Lays, had one. An additional “nine poor persons” were omitted from the list, while another seventeen had exemptions, perhaps because they too were poor or were renters. Among the forty-eight households noted in the hearth tax record, the Lays were squarely in the middle, at the lowest end of the propertied. The village would consist of fifty to sixty households over the next century.²

William and Prudence were moved by the revolutionary ferment of the 1640s and 1650s, joining the Quakers sometime after 1655. A dozen years later William was still a dissenter: he was indicted at the Essex Quarterly Court for not attending Church of England services. In 1672 he was appointed by the Quaker Colchester Monthly Meeting (CMM) to look for a proper meeting place for the local congregation. This is the only reference to William or Prudence in early Quaker records, other than notations of the births of their children. They appear not to have been active in the CMM, perhaps because they, like other members of the congregation, lived “3 Miles & so to 5, 8 & 10 Miles Distance” from the meeting place.³

Benjamin’s father—let us call him William II—was more active in the congregation, though not without controversy. He apparently married as a young man outside the Quaker faith, producing two sons, William III and John, neither of whom became Quakers, as far as can be told, and a daughter, Susanna, who did. In 1679, presumably after the death of his first wife, William II went before the CMM and “declared his intention of marriage wth Mary Dennis” (or Dennish) of Layer Breton, about five miles south of Copford. Even though Mary was apparently William’s first cousin, no objections were raised, and the union was consummated. Years later, in 1687, the CMM asked whether “marrying one so near a kin” was appropriate and added that they were “unsatisfied whether they be married or not.” At the very next meeting William presented a marriage certificate, but this caused more strife because the ceremony had been performed by an Anglican priest, which was unacceptable to the Quaker congregation. After a discussion of the case, the CMM scribe noted that William “declares that he is sorry” and accepted the “testimony of condemnation against himself & ye evil works.” All seems to have been forgiven, for in 1712 William II and his friend Robert Tibbal “conveyed a piece of Land at Copford to the meeting for a [Quaker] burial ground.” But even this act of generosity was tainted as something was wrong with the deed. The CMM concluded that “William Lay forsakes Truth, so a new deed is made mentioned in this book at ye Monthly Meeting.”⁴

William’s marriage to Mary Dennis apparently raised the family’s fortunes dramatically. He had grown up in a small one-hearth home in Copford, but in 1684, a mere nine years after he turned twenty-one, he listed in his will three substantial properties he now owned, almost certainly through Mary. He willed to his son William III “free and copy hold Lands with a Barne thereon built standing lying and being in ffordham [Fordham] and Westbergholt [West Bergholt] called or known by the names of Bishopps and Moorcrofts.” He willed to his other son, John, “all those ffree and copy hold houses and Lands whatsoever standing lying and being in Mount bures [Mount Bures] and Colne Wakes.” To wife Mary he left “free hold Houses and Lands standing lying and being in Layer Bretton,” with the provision that on her decease the property would go “to my youngest sonn Benjamin Lay,” who was then two years old. William may have worried about Benjamin’s longevity, perhaps because of his dwarfism, for he added, “If my said Sonn Benjamin shall dye before hee shall accomplish his full age of one and twenty years or day of majority,” the “Houses and Lands” would go to his older sons. Meantime William III and John moved onto their properties and turned them to immediate advantage. When they wrote up their wills years later, in 1722 and 1735, respectively, they listed themselves as “yeomen”—commoners who possessed and cultivated their own free or copyhold land. The family was moving up in social rank.⁵

Benjamin was born April 26, 1682, in the small, dark, smoky cottage in Copford and named for his maternal grandfather, Benjamin Dennis. He was followed in the family by a sister, Mary, twenty months later. Despite the upward mobility of the half-brothers, education was not yet a significant family achievement. John could not sign his own will and Benjamin himself was afforded only limited schooling. He does not appear in the “Register of the Scholars Admitted to Colchester School” between 1637 and 1740. He may have received some informal schooling within the Quaker community, even though the first official Friends school was founded too late for him, in 1698. In any case, according to Roberts Vaux and the older Quakers he interviewed, Benjamin was given nothing “more than the rudiments of learning, as taught in the lower order of English schools.” He would spend the rest of his life educating himself, becoming an autodidact known for wide reading in “theology, biography, poetry, and history.”⁶

Benjamin’s home region was dominated by the textile industry. In the late seventeenth century it was known for producing “bays and says,” coarse cloths made of combed, not carded, wool, the precursors of the contemporary cloths, baize and serge. The know-how had been brought to Essex by Dutch refugees in the 1560s and 70s. A century later, after sheep herding and spinning had proliferated across the countryside, woolens were the region’s most important export. Local chronicler Philip Morant wrote in 1768 that in Essex, “the poor are employed in spinning Wool, in most parts of the County.” When Benjamin migrated to Philadelphia in 1732 he took with him the textile culture of his home region. Among items he listed for sale were “a parcel of Wool or Worsted Combs and Wool Cards.” And Benjamin was himself a spinner, as visitors to his cave noted: skeins of yarn hung in wild profusion all about the interior. These he used to make his own clothes, suggesting a history of skill and familial involvement in textile production.⁷

Essex had a long tradition of popular protest that would be part of Benjamin’s patrimony. Major disturbances rocked the region in 1549, the year of Kett’s Rebellion against enclosure in Norfolk, and in 1566 conspiracy and resistance wracked the textile towns of northeast Essex. In 1642 thousands plundered the opulent estate of Sir John Lucas in the most dramatic attack on property committed during the English Revolution. Morant remembered the history more than a century later, remarking that the lower sort of the region were “always too much inclined to plunder.” Popular protest in Essex was many-headed: commoners protested the enclosure of common lands, unfair elections, the allocation of grain, weavers’ wages, and the authority of ministers and the church.⁸

Essex was relatedly a hotbed of religious radicalism, beginning in the early fifteenth century with the Lollards, whose heretical rejection of wealth would roil the region for more than a century. Inspired by the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, who attacked the clergy and translated the Bible into the vernacular, Essexmen joined the Lollard Revolt of 1414; executions followed, creating many a martyr over the next century. By 1440 the heretics were refusing oaths and claiming that all property should be held in common. Later they kept their hats on during prayer, practiced fierce anticlericalism, and criticized the “covetousness” of the Church of England. According to Christopher Hill, the textile region around Colchester was “a breeding ground for Lollardy.” The same was true for a new heretical movement, the Family of Love, or Familists, led by Henry Niclaes. Alongside the knowledge of bay- and say-making in the Dutch migrations of the late sixteenth century came radical religious ideas.⁹

Lollardy and Familism took root in the very region where the Lay family lived and where Quakerism would emerge in the middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed Copford’s Robert Tibball, who was surely a descendent of the Essex Lollard leader John Tyball, was apparently a lifelong friend of Benjamin’s father. William married Mary Dennis at Tibball’s home in 1678, and the two men worked together, many years later, in 1712, to procure a Quaker burial ground for the CMM. As historian Adrian Davies has shown, religious radicalism had a long underground existence in Essex. The Lays were part of it.¹⁰

QUAKER

Quakerism emerged in the English Revolution within a motley crew of uppity commoners who used the quarrel between Cavalier (Royalist) and Roundhead (Parliamentarian) elites to propose their own solutions to the problems of the day. During the 1640s, as armies warred and censorship broke down, and during the interregnum of the 1650s, Protestant radicals such as Levellers, Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, and Quakers fought to deepen and radicalize the English Revolution, establish a godly republic, and advance the principles of democracy and equality. Many of these radicals were denounced as “antinomians”—people who believed that no one had the right or power to control the human conscience. Early Quakers epitomized the type. Benjamin never used the word—it was largely an epithet used by enemies—but he was deeply antinomian in every nuance. This was the wellspring of his radicalism and of the endless conflict and controversy that were his life.¹¹

Led by the charismatic James Nayler of Yorkshire, a long-time soldier in the New Model Army, and George Fox, a shoemaker from Leicestershire known for his convulsive—quaking—manner of preaching, Quakers built a national movement in the 1650s. Nayler and Fox drew together men and women who had been Levellers, Seekers, Ranters, and Diggers to attack the Church of England: they shouted down ministers and refused to pay tithes. One Quaker recruit wrote, “I was struck with more terror before the preaching of James Naylor [sic] than I was before the Battle of Dunbar, when we had nothing else to expect but to fall a prey to the swords of our enemies.” Another man screamed at Fox: “Don’t pierce me so with thy eyes! Keep thy eyes off me!” Quakers believed that God was in each person in the form of a divine “inward light.” Deeply anticlerical, they rejected ministerial mediation between God and the believer, reserving special wrath for “hireling ministers” who “preached their bellies.” Quakers also insisted that wicked laws need not be obeyed. The early Quakers shared an affinity with the ultra-antinomian Ranters, who took their name from their rants against ungodly ministers and believed that to the pure of heart, all things were pure.¹²

Quakerism came to Benjamin’s native Colchester in the militant spirit of eighteen-year-old itinerant James Parnell in 1655. Influenced by Familism, Parnell thought the time was right “to turn the world upside down; and this is the cause why the world rages.” From Colchester jail he warned the wealthy to “weep and mourn” before the coming judgment: “the Lord is coming to burn you up as stubble before him.” Another Quaker incarcerated in Colchester was Martha Simmonds, who disrupted church services and “was moved to walke in sackcloth barefoote with her hayre spread & ashes upon her head, in the toun in the frosty weather, to the astonishment of many.” Parnell died in the jail in Colchester Castle in 1656 after a ten-month imprisonment and a ten-day fast; Simmonds went on to wilder antinomian controversy.¹³

Three principle characteristics of early Quakerism are crucial to understanding Benjamin’s life and activism two generations later: public rants against established ministers, the refusal of “hat honor,” and provocative street theater. Many Quakers, including Fox himself, routinely disrupted the services of the Church of England and other denominations. They would enter a Sunday service, sit in the congregation, wait for the minister to speak, then stand up and loudly denounce both speaker and sermon as unrighteous and unholy. Leo Damrosch has written that among the early Quakers the denunciation of ministers was “understood to be a prophetic duty, and if it gave offense, so much the better.” Best of all would be if serious persecution should follow, for this was a sure sign of God’s favor. Quaker disruptions became so frequent, Oliver Cromwell issued a national proclamation in 1655 to prevent the heckling of ministers. Hundreds of Quakers were prosecuted and imprisoned for the practice, in Colchester and across England. Benjamin would continue the tradition of speaking truth to power, after which he was physically removed from many a meeting and even jailed on occasion.¹⁴

Quakers gave new meaning to an old form of protest in England when they refused to doff their hats in the presence of a so-called social superior. Such acts of deference were crucial to maintaining harmony in a class-riven society, so the Quaker refusal was considered not only a breach of social etiquette but an act of leveling equality. Radical Quakers took the practice further: John Perrot claimed that he received “an express commandment” directly from God that men should not take off their hats during prayer. After all, God was present in all believers—all were divine and equal—so what was the point? George Fox, who thought Perrot was “Nayler risen from the dead,” was infuriated by this ultimate antinomian act, so he clamped down against the practice. But Perrot had preached in Colchester in 1657 and attracted numerous followers there, including members of the influential Furly family. The hat controversy would smolder on in the region and Benjamin would carry the practice into the eighteenth century.¹⁵

Early Quakers acted out high religious drama in public in order to shock people out of their sinful complacency. They conducted religious services anywhere and everywhere, in a private home, a barn, an open field, or in the streets, because they believed that a church was not a physical structure but rather any congregation of godly people. They frequently performed deliberately wild and eccentric acts such as “going naked for a sign” or burning a Bible in public to emphasize the primacy of the “inward light.” One Quaker “came naked through [Westminster] hall, only very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal, and with a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone upon his head did pass through the Hall, crying, ‘Repent! Repent!’” Women often played leading roles in these apocalyptic dramas.¹⁶

The most famous piece of Quaker guerrilla theater featured James Nayler, who, surrounded by Martha Simmonds and other Quaker women singing hosannas and laying flowers in his path, reenacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on a donkey in October...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Prophet Against Slavery
• Chapter One: Early Life
• Chapter Two: “A Man of Strife & Contention”
• Chapter Three: Philadelphia’s “Men of Renown”
• Chapter Four: How Slave Keepers Became Apostates
• Chapter Five: Books and a New Life
• Chapter Six: Death, Memory, Impact
• Conclusion: The Giant Oak
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgement
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Dates
• Notes
• Illustration Sources and Credits
• Index