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Editions: Fox's Journal The core of the project is a new edition of the best-known firsthand account, Fox's Journal. There are three major versions of this: the Short Journal (dictated 1664); what we have christened the Long Journal (dictated c.1675–8); and the printed edition produced after Fox's death by Thomas Ellwood A Journal or Historical Account of of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Ancient, Eminent and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, George Fox ... (London: 1694). All three are markedly different. Each is equally valid. Because of this, we have presented each in a separate section as the centre of its own story, with the comparative materials clustered around it. An electronic edition offers previously unimaginable opportunities for presenting text and comparing different versions of the ‘same’ narrative. High–resolution scans (made by the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) enable close-up examination of handwriting and alterations made during and after the process of dictation. We have made diplomatic editions (i.e. transcriptions with almost no editorial intervention) of each version, marking up these alterations in different colours according to when in the dictation process we think they were made. We have also been able to place the transcription next to an image of the
original, and to compare each
version with the two others. The two manuscript transcriptions have also been provided with a
modern-spelling version — the 1694 edition is fairly comprehensible to a modern reader. We intend to organise a search engine for the site. For many generations of Quakers, the 1694 edition was ‘the Journal’. The 1911 Cambridge University Press edition of the Long Journal (Spence Manuscript) by Norman Penney, and its 1925 companion The Short Journal and Itinerary Journals of George Fox edited by T. Edmund Harvey, introduced the manuscript versions to a wider audience, but the need to juggle two heavy volumes made comparison difficult. The more compendious edition of J.L. Nickalls (Cambridge: 1952) produces a composite version from manuscripts and printed edition; the Penguin Journal edited by Nigel Smith (1998) is based on this Spence Manuscript (but omitting the interpolated documents which comprise a substantial part of the manuscript). Both these editions are modern-spelling versions. We hope this edition will introduce the complexity of ‘The Journal’ in an easily assimilable visual fashion. The fact that it only covers two years (1652 and 1653) gives some idea of the immensity of the task of producing a similar edition of the all three versions of the whole Journal. Maps: modern and ancient The facilities provided by Google Maps™ allow us to customise their satellite images to show not only where Fox's contacts lived, but the routes he might have taken. Their ‘Terrain’ images give an excellent idea of the topography of the countryside, and why he might have travelled by one route rather than another. We can combine this with our ground-level photographs to give a sense of the kind of terrain through which he passed. Google Street View is also very helpful, and allows you to tour through the terrain — but only by adopted roads. Google also supplies a range of thumbnail photographs, and Wikipedia information about some of the places. We do not know if Fox used maps to plan his journeys. However, they give us a good idea of how his contemporaries perceived the landscape. They fall into two categories: County Maps: these are surprising to modern eyes because they do not show roads: but they give detailed information about rivers, bridges, towns, and churches and chapels. Hills are shown as individual humps; Road maps, which like the old Automobile Association personalised maps, concentrate on the routes, orienting the traveller with a compass rose, and showing side roads, landmarks, and the type of terrain, hills to be surmounted and rivers to be crossed. John Ogilby, the pioneer of route maps, published his Britannia in 1675: the routes he shows would have been familiar to Fox. However, Ogilby and his imitators stick to main roads, largely radiating from London. There were many well trodden cross-country routes in the North, which we now think of as ‘drove roads’. Many have been reclassified as walkers' paths, like the ’ Pennine and Dales Ways. We should remember that routes have changed: the turnpike road from Hawes to Ingleton (now the B6255) was built in 1795 when Hawes took over from Askrigg as the main market town of upper Wensleydale; the road from Levens to Grange over Sands was impassible in poor weather. At the moment, maps are accessed from links in the text of the Journal, and from a separate index page collecting all current ones together. Currently, these consist of recent photographs, and some late 18th- and early 19th-century engravings which show the countryside before urban sprawl (across Lancaster to Morecambe Bay, Carlisle from the West), or structures which have since disappeared (Lancaster Old Bridge, Carlisle Jail). Near-contemporary sketches by the Rev. Thomas Machell (1692) show churches and some buildings as they would have looked when Fox visited them. Some captions merely identify the scenes and give attributions to the photographers/artists. Others provide more contextual information. The next stage is in the process of adding detailed information about buildings and sites, initially by linking through to the National Monuments Record'’s PastScape, and any near-contemporary descriptions such as those in Camden’s Britannia (1610). It is important to emphasise that even the landscape has changed since Fox’s time. Even without the effects of urbanisation, industrialisation, and transport systems, a glance at the early 19th-century engraving of Morecambe Bay from Lindale compared with a recent photograph (below) will show how the Bay has shifted. Agriculture and land use has also changed. For a lavishly illustrated overview, see Angus Winchester with Alan Crosby England’s Landscape: the North West (London: Collins, 2006). Video made by Lancaster University Television (camera, David Blacow) is used to suggest an experience of being in or moving through the places in the North West — the landscapes, the buildings, prisons, courthouses &mdash in which Quaker belief was shaped, with the inevitable caveat that many of these have changed since the seventeenth century. Film of seventeenth-century artefacts is juxtaposed with footage of the sites as they appear today. These images are accompanied by soundtrack of sections of the Long Journal, read by Stephen Longstaffe (University of Cumbria). Shifting from past to present cannot hope to offer an ‘authentic’ experience of place, even one experienced by our modern sensibilities. Instead, the videos aim to illustrate how Fox’s Journal self-consciously presents official spaces such as steeplehouses, prisons, and courtrooms in opposition to open spaces or the houses of early Friends, sites which were more hospitable to a revelation that the inner light was present in everyone. We have taken advantage of the facilities provided by Google Video™ for delivering Flash versions of the videos embedded in our pages. Michael Bowen has worked on producing the optimum encoding for these. A public lecture in the Shire Hall, Lancaster Castle, on ‘Beyond the Lancashire Witches: Writing and Freedom’, Thursday 27 November 2014, featured a dramatisation by the Project team of the 1652 hearing against George Fox on a charge of blasphemy (Long Journal fols 45r–48v). We hope to put up the excerpt showing the trial sequence from the video currently on YouTube (starting at 21min 35sec) on this website soon. It should lead the way for similar dramatisations of other Quaker trials, of which there are detailed verbatim records, probably made originally in shorthand. A website based on the Journal is bound to be essentially Fox-centred. The convincement of the North West was not however a task for one person, no matter how charismatic. Fox mentions, almost in passing, companions like Richard Farnsworth and William Dewsbury, though the activities of James Naylor are passed over very briefly, presumably in the light of his later perceived excesses: And Jam: Naylor hee trauailed vppe & downe in many places amongst people yt was conuinct: & att last hee & ff: Howghill were cast Into prison by ye malitious preists & magistrates Into Apleby goale [Spence MS folio 40r] We are producing brief biographies of everyone he mentions in this portion of the Journal. (At the moment they are accessed from links in the text and on a dedicated section.) Already they extend our perception of the pattern of Quaker activity. They also give some sense of the kind of people they were. Fox himself was not particularly interested in the outward man, though he produces the odd annihilating vignette. Fortunately the early Quakers were enthusiastic about memorialising their heroes and their own life-testimonies, and give some vivid images of their subjects. Apart from individual tributes, the submissions of the various Quarterly Meetings called in in 1705 by Yearly Meeting when they realised the first generation of memories was dying out, and edited in 1907 by Norman Penney as The First Publishers of Truth give valuable details of the corporate spreading of the message. One can also call on the data from record offices and the other standard sources used by local and national historians. The recent boom in family history has placed much of this online. For those who have the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography available (in the UK it can often be accessed through your local library card number), there are more detailed biographies of the better-known figures such as Gervase Benson and Francis Howgill. At the moment these are accessed by links from the texts of the three versions of the Journal, and provide back-up to the biographies or accounts of places. They contain slightly longer excerpts from First Publishers and the various first-hand accounts and memorials. We are much indebted to EEBO, Early English Books Online (Chadwyck Healey) which gives electronic facsimiles from microfilm of all books published in English up to 1700, and to ECCO, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (Gale Publishing), which continues this through to 1800. Between them they have revolutionised this area of research. Joseph Besse’s Sufferings (1753) and John Field’s Piety promoted, in a collection of dying sayings of many of the people called Quakers. With a brief account of some of their labours (the 1725 version) both appear in ECCO and are invaluable. There are however some unexpected sources: see the information on Captain Henry Ward. Anti-Quaker polemic is also highly instructive as well as shamefully entertaining. We shall apply to the university for a further grant for help in enlarging the historical material and in identifying and transcribing other early Quaker documents in print and manuscript. A major part of this will be examining the relationship of the interpolated papers in the Spence MS, some of which were published by Fox as/in pamphlets, and some in the 1694 edition. The advances in GIS mapping will enable us radically to expand this section, overlaying modern maps with data about terrain (and changes of terrain such as land reclamation and road building), communities, family networks, local industries and occupations (agriculture, trading, mining), clusters of religious sects (e.g. Seekers), religious affiliations of local clergy, chapels of ease, markets, assize courts and prisons, places of preaching and confrontation, besides the obvious mapping of Fox’s routes and contemporary road networks. These can be inked with modern photographs and earlier images of places, and accounts by travellers (see ‘Maps’ section above). There will be a new section for scholarly articles by ourselves and other Quaker historians which engage with topics relating to the project. We will also have a section for feedback from our readers on their experience of working with the site, and their own sense of the spiritual dimension of travel. |