Ifield Friends Meeting House - History

History

The Ifield area has a long history of Protestant Nonconformism and Dissent. As early as 1655, George Fox—one of the founders of the Religious Society of Friends—and a Quaker preacher, Alexander Parker, held meetings and preached at a private house in the village. Meetings became more regular in the next two decades, but were still held in parishioners' houses. There were strong feelings both in favour of and against the growing Quaker community: the vicar of St Margaret's Church (the parish church) between 1667 and 1679, Henry Halliwell, was strongly opposed to Nonconformism and preached and wrote against it, whereas a protest in the church in 1658 by a parishioner sympathetic to Quaker beliefs was allowed to continue without interruption. William Penn lived nearby before leaving England for America and founding Pennsylvania; he had links with the local Quaker community and the meeting house in their early days, and clashed with Henry Halliwell. In response to Penn's 1673 treatise entitled Wisdom Justified of her Children from Calumny of Henry Halliwell, Halliwell wrote a piece called Impertinent Cavils of William Penn.

By 1676, 27% of adults in the parish of Ifield, which covered 4,000 acres (1,600 ha) of mostly rural land in north Sussex, described themselves as Nonconformist. Some would have been Presbyterians, Unitarians or Baptists, for example, but most were Quakers. Meetings for Quaker women in the parish were started the previous year. In 1676, land and money bequeathed by a local blacksmith, Robert Robinson, was used to build a dedicated, purpose-built meeting house for the community. It has been continuously used for worship since then, and is one of the oldest Friends meeting houses still in existence anywhere in the world.