Bunyan was not the sole incarcerated Dissenter who put pen to paper. Quakers, in particular, were frequently imprisoned and often recounted their ordeals. They were considered to be members of a dangerous cult, the disseminators of dissident views, but famed for their integrity, obstinacy and literacy.

In Bedfordshire their persecution had begun in 1655 when three Quakers were arrested on frivolous charges but detained in prison for a month for refusing to remove their hats in court. The following year Isabel Parlour ‘for exhorting the people to … repentance and amendment of life’ was detained for a month in the bridewell where she was whipped. In 1658 a couple were imprisoned for ‘living in sin’: they were married but according to Quaker rites. In March 1661 fifty-two Quakers appeared before the Bedford assizes for refusing to conform. Despite appealing to the grand jury to do justice to those who, for conscience sake, had endured ‘nasty prisons, holes and dungeons, under the custody of cruel and unmerciful jailors’, they were indicted.

Bedford was far from unique. Throughout the land, and no more so than in London, thousands of Quakers were subject to persecution and prosecution. Their movement thrived under chastisement. If they could not be indicted for sedition, in that they refused to remove their hats they could always be imprisoned or fined for contempt of court. Peripatetic as they tended to be, the same individuals often experienced incarceration in several different gaols. As the political wind blew, so their lot would change from