The establishment of Quakerism in north-east England

The economic implication of early industrialisation has at times overshadowed the individual social and cultural experiences of those living in north-east England. From the late sixteenth century onwards new social hierarchies were formed as money was earned in the coal industry, salt and glass manufacturing, mercantile trade and ship building at Newcastle upon Tyne, North Shields, South Shields and Sunderland. Placed within these economic activities were individuals defining themselves not only by their affiliations with business and industry but also through their cultural associations. Beginning in 1653, Quakers, later known as the Society of Friends, began a concerted ministering campaign in County Durham and Newcastle. As the Quaker movement evolved to form a structured and disciplined religious organisation, members within the North-east's meetings re-evaluated their economic activities to fit the moral code of the Society. The introduction of a meeting system, which consisted of local monthly and quarterly meetings, and a yearly meeting of Quakers in London, provided a local, regional and national platform to address issues among members. Meetings instructed their religious followers on how to live an orderly life and disciplined those who strayed from the Quaker principles. In north-east England the registers for the monthly meetings record the dynamic relationship between individual rank and file members and the authoritative nature of the meeting system. In particular, the minutes for Newcastle upon Tyne reveal the precarious relationship between the Society's moral beliefs, their enforcement of discipline and individual members’ participation in the economic growth of north-east England.

The Quaker movement in the 1650s is frequently defined by adherents’ use of public disorderliness. Their interpretation of an inner and direct communication with God – the Inner Light – was regarded as blasphemous by contemporary opponents. Quakers insisted on plain dress and socially levelling linguistic styles, and their ministerial efforts were often expressed through the interruption of church services and preaching in busy market places and large open spaces. There was no trained Quaker ministry, since the very notion of an exclusive clergy conflicted with the Quaker denouncement of purposefully educated ministers in the Church of England.

Sunderland was always about more than coal. Though the shipping of coal to the continent, London and the rest of the country dominated the economy of the River Wear, it was the development of other skills and the exploitation of other relationships that made that development possible. The argument here is that without the development of a distinctive local culture, above all in political organisation and exploiting contacts and patrons, both regionally and nationally, the economy at the mouth of the River Wear could not have developed so successfully between 1700 and 1800. It required a cohesive local business and landed class, participation in the political networks of County Durham and the region with regard to handling the problems of the coal trade and industrial disputes, and the passage through parliament of many enabling pieces of legislation. The integration of the place and its leaders into local and national politics was fundamental to the economic development of the river and port. The communities at the mouths of the Rivers Wear and Tyne, though growing rapidly between 1660 and 1800, did not form an incorporated town or parliamentary borough. Yet the course of the River Wear was deepened through the powers of the River Wear commissioners set up by an Act of Parliament in 1717, and many other improvements were made by the powers granted in subsequent legislation. The Wear became the other coal-exporting river along with the Tyne, vital to London's growing need for coal, and providing at least the possibility of competitive prices. Its national importance, however, could not be taken for granted, and it was the formation of personal and political links that made it possible.

The area widely known as ‘Sunderland’ was not a single place or, officially, a community, but rather, three parishes, one ancient ecclesiastical borough, one major industry (though with others competing for space and attention) and one river. There was no civic authority that encompassed all the people at the mouth of the river, nor a single form of representation to the county or the nation. The challenge is how to make sense of a town without formal civic government which was, nevertheless, able to operate effectively at all the levels of parish, river, region and nation.

The decline of the peasantry and the associated emergence of the yeomanry as a social group in England has long provoked questions about the role of economic and cultural factors, as for instance over whether their relative market orientation represented oppressive seigniorial exactions or a unique peasant mentality. Eric Wolf's distinction that a ‘peasant runs a household, not a business concern’, succinctly represents this debate, suggesting not only a quantitative difference between commercial farmers and peasantries but also a qualitative one. Perhaps the most radical cultural definition of peasants in this period was applied by Alan Macfarlane, who drew upon anthropological studies of late nineteenth-century Polish and Russian peasantries to establish the characteristics of a peasant society in which there were no institutional property rights because land was vested in the family group. There could, therefore, be neither sale nor inheritance of goods, for no individual ‘owned’ them, and so he concluded that English society displayed a remarkable degree of individualism which precluded the existence of a peasantry. However, Jane Whittle has criticised this as being an ‘unusually constrictive definition of peasant society and economy, stressing an almost total lack of market relations in peasant societies’, whilst Henry French and Richard Hoyle have similarly criticised it for there ‘seemed to be no good reason why one historically specific form of peasantry should be the standard against which all others should be judged’. These three historians have in turn provided alternative definitions of peasant societies, with Whittle concluding that peasants are ‘small-scale agricultural producers who are in possession of land which is farmed primarily with family labour and with the main aim of providing the family directly with a means of subsistence’.

French and Hoyle, in their work on Earls Colne (Essex), have, furthermore, emphasised that there was a transformation in the mentalities of early modern farmers that was a key process in the decline of the English peasantry. They bear quoting at length:

Since the publication of Heinrich von Sybel's Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzugs in 1841, partially translated into English by Lady Duff Gordon in 1861 within her compilation The History and Literature of the Crusades, the critical interrogation of literary texts has been at the heart of scholarly approaches to the crusading movement. This stems from the prevalence of ‘crusade texts’ in the medieval world; the expeditions associated with the crusading movement, particularly those to the East, are among the best evidenced events in the Middle Ages. For contemporaries, the cultural phenomenon of crusading, constantly adapting and shifting in definition and scope, was an attractive subject for oral, poetic, and literary composition. Thus, modern scholars of the crusades, following in the disciplinary footsteps of von Sybel, have been forced to engage with a daunting corpus of diverse accounts and responses to the blend of pilgrimage, holy war, and penitential activity which characterized the medieval crusading movement. But in the process of this, historians have often been guilty of inheriting elements of the same mid-nineteenth century theoretical approach – grounded in a dedication to empirical objectivity – determined to disregard elements of the text which are seemingly less useful for establishing the past, in von Sybel's mentor Leopold von Ranke's words, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, ‘as it essentially was’. Whole texts have been misguidedly excluded from the historiographical mainstream for decades on grounds of being ‘unreliable’. For this reason, an arbitrary methodological divide between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ has often been evident. Literary scholars have enthusiastically taken up the challenge of analyzing less prosaic texts neglected by historians, but, with some exceptions, their findings have been slow to be reincorporated into historical understanding of the crusading movement and its cultural significance. A further contributing factor in this process has been the divide imposed by the disciplinary categorization of vernacular languages into ‘national’ literatures, whilst Latin texts have been conceptually distanced from their context of vernacular accounts, with which they clearly interacted. This volume is, in large part, intended to redress these shortcomings.

It is not alone in so doing. Recent years have seen a significant growth in research which makes innovative inquiries of this extensive corpus of texts, poems, and songs as works of literature, with their own artistic and semiotic rationale, rather than as repositories of defective source material representing an external historical reality.

In October 1192, during the Third Crusade, after having taken Acre, Arsuf, and occupied Jaffa, Richard I looked poised to take Jerusalem, when suddenly he decided to return home. What prompted his decision probably lay in the situation that had been emerging back in the West. Richard, who had only been crowned king of England a short while before leaving the country for the crusade (3 September 1189), had left government of the kingdom to his brother John, offering him lands in England and the county of Mortain in Normandy to try and keep his ambitions in check. John lost little time in plotting against his brother, especially once Philip Augustus, who had left the crusade earlier, in August 1191, was back in France and was seizing the opportunity to manipulate John to his advantage, despite having made an agreement with Richard (what might be termed a ‘gentleman's agreement’ between crusaders) that neither would attack the other's interests while one or both were serving God's cause.

Richard's journey home was planned rather differently than his outward journey in 1190. At that time he had travelled first to Vézelay to meet up with Philip Augustus, then on to Lyon and Marseille, whence he sailed down the Italian coast, stopping off to see, I suspect Virgilian and Norman, sites in Naples and Salerno, visiting Mileto in Calabria and finally reaching Sicily on 23 September, where he intended upholding his sister Joan's rights over Tancred of Lecce. Joan had been widowed in 1189 on the death of her husband William II of Sicily, who had bequeathed her considerable sums of money along with the lordship of Monte Sant'Angelo on the Gargano peninsula in Apulia. William had left no male heirs and the Sicilian throne was contested by his illegitimate cousin, Tancred, and by the emperor, Henry VI, in the name of his wife, Constance de Hauteville, daughter to Roger II of Sicily. In 1190 Tancred was on the throne and had no intention of giving Joan her inheritance, keeping her a virtual prisoner at Palermo. This, then, was the matter Richard came to discuss in Sicily, also because Joan's inheritance would have been useful for covering some of the costs of the crusade.

Introduction: religious conflict and cooperation in northern Nigeria

Since the late 1980s, interfaith relations in northern Nigeria have been marked by intensifying conflict, involving over 10,000 deaths as well as widespread economic disruption (Haynes 2009). Repeated clashes between the Muslim majority and Christian minorities have taken place in various northern cities. While identity-based violence tended to take an ethnic form prior to the 1980s, such clashes began to assume an explicitly religious tone with the Maitatsine riots and the infamous ‘burning of churches’ in the 1980s. Local struggles over land and authority, controversy over perceived slights to Islam, and reactions to the implementation of Sharia law in several northern states triggered waves of religious clashes in the succeeding decades, often spreading through several northern cities. Since 2009, the activities of the extremist Islamic group, Boko Haram, have set off new rounds of religious violence in the core north.

These tales of carnage make it easy to forget that historically, religion has played an integrative rather than a conflictual role in northern Nigeria. Economic historians have documented the role of Islam in bridging ethnic divides and providing a framework for economic cooperation and trade across northern Nigeria and West Africa more broadly (Austen 1987; Curtin 1975; Hopkins 1973; Lovejoy 1980). More recently, economic anthropologists and sociologists have traced the role of ethno-religious networks in extending informal trading systems across Nigeria and outward into neighbouring West African countries (Anthony 2000, 2002; Forrest 1994; Hashim & Meagher 1999; Meagher 2009a). How can communities locked in such violent religious conflict also participate in relations of close economic collaboration? Is mounting religious violence in northern Nigeria breaking down older relations of trust and inter-religious cooperation, or do informal economic linkages across religious lines help to mitigate contemporary religious divisions? These questions will be addressed in the context of empirical research on cross-religious informal economic organization carried out in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna. An ethnography of informal economic relations across the religious divide will be used to trace a more complex picture of the informal institutional processes at work under the surface of contemporary religious tensions in northern Nigeria. The objective is to explore how popular institutions of economic collaboration and the political mobilization of religious conflict shape social resilience amid religious tension and conflict.

The ways in which crusade participants perceived and interacted with their Muslim adversaries have long occupied the attention of historians. Given the crusaders’ willingness to negotiate with their Muslim counterparts, and to engage in a variety of other non-violent modes of contact, it now seems likely that at least some participants possessed a pragmatic attitude towards their opponents, rather than an immutable hatred. Tied to this, there is an ongoing debate regarding whether crusading and the fervour of holy war manifested a distinctive or heightened breed of brutality, one which surpassed the normative standards of contemporary internecine warfare in Europe and elsewhere.

Analysing western caricatures of Muslims in medieval literature has proved equally fruitful, with a growing corpus of scholarship devoted to this topic in a crusading context. In 1982, Paul Bancourt offered piecemeal observations regarding their portrayal in chansons de croisade and crusade chronicles, while more recently his work has been supplemented – and extended – by John Tolan, Carol Sweetenham, and Armelle Leclercq, amongst others. Collectively, these scholars have elucidated a plethora of tropes that western writers applied to the crusaders’ enemies, including accusations of paganism, polytheism, and idolatry, as well as the emphasis on their demonic, bestial, and lustful qualities. Notwithstanding this barrage of derogatory stereotypes, it has long been recognized that crusade sources proffer far more than a monolithic blanket of antagonism. Moments of praise for Muslim martial capabilities, and the emergence of the ‘noble Saracen’ tradition in western literature – typified by Saladin's transformation into an epitome of chivalry – attest that European attitudes towards Muslims were complex and multifaceted.

Focusing on the Latin narratives of crusading expeditions to the Holy Land between 1095 and 1192, this chapter considers a facet that has hitherto received only minimal attention: emotional characterizations of Muslim protagonists. Other scholars have demonstrated that, despite modulations over time and variations between the texts, the crusades were commonly perceived in Manichean terms as a contest between the good, just Christians and the evil, unjust Muslims – a sentiment famously echoed in the Chanson de Roland. It is the central argument of this chapter that emotional descriptors participated in, and helped to reinforce, this fundamental binary opposition within Latin crusade chronicles. A holistic analysis of the emotional rhetoric associated with Muslims is beyond the scope of this study; instead, it scrutinizes two interlocking narrative functions of emotions.

Introduction

This book is about the encounters between Muslims and Christians in northern Nigeria and the challenges posed in the process to the wider Nigerian society. Juergensmeyer (2003, 4) notes that ‘religions move and intertwine’. This is obvious from the history of northern Nigeria over the past ten centuries when traditional African religions were joined on the scene, first by Islam, and then by Christianity. The resulting rubbing against each other – sometimes peaceably, sometimes, less so, sometimes for the common good, and sometimes for narrow sectarian ends – constitute the religious encounters. Northern Nigeria is not unique in this process of religious interaction, expansion, synthesis, conversion, competition, borrowing, conflict and change. But the outcomes in northern Nigeria have produced intensifying levels of religious conflict and violence. This is what this book seeks to explain, so that policy makers and the general public can have a better, more nuanced, understanding of the challenges to be addressed, despite the charged political context and emotions involved on all sides.

In the course of the religious encounters in northern Nigeria, a religious mosaic emerged by the early colonial period, made up of five interacting components: (1) the Islamic populations of the Northern emirates; (2) pockets of Hausa-Fulani Christian converts in Zaria, southwestern Kano, Sokoto, and Katsina; (3) a progressively diminishing population of Maguzawa or followers of indigenous Hausa religions, especially to be found in the bori practitioners of Kano, Katsina and Zaria Provinces; (4) millions of recently converted non-Hausa Christians in the Middle Belt and southern Borno; and (5) and an increasing population of persons from Southern Nigerian ethnicities, Christians as well as Muslims belonging to Islamic groups like the Ahmadiyya and Ansarudeen, unfamiliar in the emirates. This complex religious tapestry increasingly constituted what I call contentious religious pluralism, but it is the relationship between the Muslim and the Christian communities that is most critical. These two communities are unique because, as Juergensmeyer (2003, 7) notes, they are religious traditions with universal pretensions and global ambitions: