Local Quakers

Introduction

In 2013 Stan Terrett (a long serving councillor of Baughurst Parish Council) published his book “Baughurst..a history” which provided some fascinating insights into Baughurst and the people who lived here up until around the1940s. We wanted to pay tribute to this fine work and the earlier “Memories of Baughurst” – a collection of reminiscences – by extracting stories about places and people of Baughurst for you. These and many other histories are amplified on the Baughurst Society’s web site.

Local Quakers

In the seventeenth century, the Civil War and a dislike of the power and wealth of the established church saw Non-conformism flourish.  From 1652, George Fox united a growing number of individual ‘seeker’ groups into a movement called The Society of Friends (the Quakers) who believed in freedom to practice their own religion which was mostly contrary to established Church and Civil Law. This brought them into frequent conflict with the Church which was the guardian of the law.

After a visit to Basingstoke by Fox in 1657, a young follower, James Potter, was charged for standing up and reading a ‘Friends’ paper in church by Edward Bentall, the Rector who was a Calvinist Puritan. He was  condemned by the magistrate at Manydown and sent to prison in Winchester for 5 years. His brother and sister, Richard and Ann, were also roughly dealt with as they refused to pay tithes. When released in 1662, Potter set up the first Baughurst Quaker meeting in Richard’s house (now Browns Farm, Pound Green) and, in the following year, they conducted the first burial in the garden of their ‘Meeting House’.

The Rector was himself in difficulties in 1662, when Charles II replaced Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and as a puritan with no patron he lost his position. With a tolerant incumbent (George Musgrave 1662-1666) and with the passing of the ‘Five Mile Act’ in 1665 (which forbade Non-Conformist ministers from preaching within five miles of a town where they had previously preached), the Quaker movement in Baughurst grew into one of the biggest Quaker centres in the south of England and attracted participants from Alton, Basingstoke, Kingsclere, Newbury, Reading and Oxfordshire. During these times, Fox visited their Meeting House (1670) and James Potter was elected to several high offices in the Hampshire Quaker movement.

The Potters had been at Brown’s Farm for years, but in 1678 they inherited the house opposite (now Baughurst House) and in 1695 the leaders agreed they should meet in this house and that burials should take place in a piece of land in Towns End that James owned. The Toleration Act of 1689 resolved many religious problems and, along with the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, gave a respite from persecution and reduced the importance of Baughurst for the Quakers, and the Basingstoke Meeting re-opened in 1693.  James Potter died in 1703 and was buried at Towns End, his son-in-law, John Harris, took over his mantle; however he was more interested in becoming a country gentleman and the Baughurst meeting declined further under his lack of leadership.

1728 saw a third move of the Quaker Meeting House; Baughurst House was given to John Harris as a residence and Rose Cottage, in Baughurst Road belonging to Leonard Cole, was proposed in its place. Rose Cottage was bounded on the south side by the farm of John Buller – a leading Quaker who had goods confiscated in lieu of unpaid tithes in 1759. In 1735 a burial ground was established to the west of the cottage, evidence of this was found in the 1970’s when main sewerage pipes were laid in the garden. Cole was the leader of the local Quakers but, when he died in 1744, Buller took over.

Richard Brown who lived at Baughurst Mill (now Malthouse Farm), Richard Potter’s estate in 1747 and changed the name of the first Meeting House to Brown’s Farm.  When he died in 1779 there were few influential people of Quaker persuasion left as some villagers were joining the Anglicans and many farm workers had fallen under the spell of a new evangelism, Methodism.