The persecution of Quakers for vagrancy in the British Atlantic, c. 1640-1750

'I defy the life of a vagabond: that Law is a wicked Law, and very wicked and unrighteous men are they, that cause those who fear the Lord to suffer by such a wicked Law.'1 This was the defence used by the Quaker Edward Wharton following his arrest for vagrancy in 1664. Emerging in the mid-seventeenth century, the Quakers were a radical religious group whose belief that all people were equal before God challenged contemporary ideas of religious and social hierarchy.2 Wharton was one of the thousands of early Quakers who suffered persecution and harassment, and one of hundreds persecuted as vagrants.3 While arrests for vagrancy are well-documented within early Quaker records, also known as accounts of their 'Sufferings', this form of persecution has received very little historical attention.

This project will address that gap by offering the first full-length investigation into how the practice of persecution of Quakers under the Vagrancy Laws played out across the British Atlantic. The Quakers were a fully transatlantic movement and engaged in widespread missionary work, but their itinerant lifestyles often led to accusations of vagrancy in the places they visited.4 This project will therefore examine the contexts in which Quakers were treated and punished as vagrants across the British Atlantic, with a particular focus on the British Isles, Britain's North American Colonies, and the West Indies.

In investigating the colonial as well as the national contexts, this project will provide the first transatlantic study into Quakerism and vagrancy, and, more broadly, the first study of vagrancy across the British Atlantic world. As there is no study which compares the treatment of Quakers as vagrants to other religious sects, this project will consider the experience of radical religious groups such as the Fifth Monarchists who were also arrested as vagrants.5

There is a rich scholarship on radical religion in the seventeenth century, and the various forms of persecution that the Quakers and other religious sects faced.6 Despite this, historians of early Quakerism tend to only briefly mention arrests for vagrancy within studies on other topics.7 David Hitchcock provides the only study solely dedicated to early Quakerism and vagrancy in his 2018 article on the cultural representations of this phenomenon in polemical

literature during the Interregnum.8 This project will go beyond Hitchcock's focus on cultural meaning and literary sources by using a greater variety of sources such as legal and civic records to explore how the marginalisation of Quakers as social and religious outsiders manifested in practice. It will also expand the timeline beyond the 1650s into the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to consider how the persecution of Quakers as vagrants changed over time, and how practices of persecution were impacted by changes to laws and policies.

Although the 1689 Act of Toleration is no longer viewed by historians as a watershed moment for the toleration of religious dissenters, it did legalise Quaker worship.9

It is therefore important to consider the impact of the Act on the treatment and perception of Quakers as vagrants, especially considering that no study on this topic progresses this far chronologically, despite historians like Hitchcock and Erin Bell arguing that hostilities against Quakers continued into the eighteenth century.