Charlbury - Religious Society of Friends

Religious Society of Friends

Quakerism reached Charlbury in the Commonwealth that followed the English Civil War. Anne Downer, the daughter of a former Vicar of Charlbury, joined the Religious Society of Friends in London in 1654. In 1655 she became the first Quaker woman preacher, for which she was imprisoned and beaten. In 1656 she preached in Chadlington, and then went to Cornwall to serve as secretary to the Quaker leader George Fox. She then preached at Charlbury, where Quaker meetings were held in the homes of two converts, William Cole and Alexander Harris. Both men were jailed in 1657–58 for refusing to pay tithes to the Church of England, and Cole died in prison.

Many Quakers in Charlbury were distrained for refusing to pay the Church Rate. In 1660 a Chadlington Quaker who attended the Charlbury meetings was jailed for refusing to swear the Oath of Allegiance and in 1663 Henry Shad, a Quaker schoolmaster, was barred from teaching.

In 1669 about 30 members were meeting in Harris's house. In 1680 a meeting at Cole's house to hear Thomas Taylor, a preacher from the north of England, was so crowded that the local Quakers decided to build a meeting house. Quakers including Thomas Gilkes of Sibford Gower gave land on which a meeting house was built in 1681. By 1689 the meeting house had a burial ground, but early in the next century membership declined and for a time meetings were discontinued.

In 1779 a new meeting house was built on the same site and the burial ground was enlarged. It is a square Georgian building with a hipped roof and arched windows. The number of members attending Quaker meetings was 35 in 1826 and 39 in 1851. After the First World War attendance declined rapidly and in the 1920s the meeting house was closed and turned into a preparatory school.

The Thomas Gilkes who helped to provide the land for the meeting house had a son of the same name who became a clockmaker in Sibford Gower. He trained his son — a third Thomas Gilkes (1704–57) — in the same trade. This Gilkes established his own clockmaking business in Charlbury, and was reputed also to be an eminent Quaker minister. He was succeeded by his son, a fourth Thomas Gilkes (1740–75). A number of longcase clocks made by the two men still exist.

William Harrison was a later Quaker clockmaker at Charlbury. A longcase clock that he made in about 1770 is known to survive. Another longcase clock by Harrison is in the Charlbury Society Museum. In 1792 Harrison installed the turret clock at University College, Oxford.

Quakers had to be apprenticed to fellow Quakers, and those at Charlbury were part of a network of Quaker clockmakers in north Oxfordshire who were all linked by either family, former apprenticeship or both. As well as Sibford and Charlbury, Adderbury and Deddington were also centres of Quaker clockmaking.