The aim of this communication is to illustrate and examine the official attitude of the Quakers to their testimony on plainness in the eighteenth century, with a few examples, limited by available space, of the opinions of individuals. It is also limited to England since official attitudes in America and Ireland were somewhat different; it attempts no comparison with other contemporary English traditions; it cannot do more than touch on such gaps as may have existed between individual practice and official attitude; nor can it make use of the ample surviving local records. To understand what lay behind the testimony on plainness it is necessary to go back briefly to the rise of Quakerism in the mid-seventeenth century.

‘You can never cross the Pont Neuf without seeing a monk, a white horse and a whore’, ran the proverb – which was hard luck on the two ladies who stood there and saw the first two but could not find the third: ‘Pour la catin, vous et moi nous n’en sommes pas en peines’. Members of the religious Orders in their costumes of black, white, brown and grey were a feature of the scene in the streets of every town, and everyone had a monk or nun among their relatives. Voltaire’s sardonic examples of the characteristic features of the civilisation of his day included them: ‘man will always be what he is now; this does not mean to say, however, that there will always be fine cities, cannons firing a shot of 24 lbs weight, comic operas and convents of nuns’. Routine gossip slipped naturally into analogies drawn from the cloister – she is as fat as a monk; they were like children at a window crying out when they first see a Capucin friar; you are like a novice who climbs the walls looking for a lover, while the nuns in the chapel pray for her. Voltaire uses monastic titles in jocular descriptions of himself and his friends. He is the ‘old hermit’, the ‘lay brother’, the ‘solitary’, ‘brother Voltaire, dead to the world and in love with his cell and his convent’, and once, when his play Octave et le jeune Pompée was a flop, he decided to be, for a while, ‘the little ex-Jesuit’, ‘le petit défroqué’. He hopes ‘brother’ Helvétius will be elected to the Academy: ‘these are the most ardent prayers of the monk Voltairius, who from his lonely cell unites himself in spirit with his brethren’. The badinage of monastic seclusion hinted at protest at his long exile from Paris; it also served to mask the social distinctions, which, in spite of familiarity and, even, friendship, were never forgotten between the court grandees and the intellectuals. It was easier for Choiseul to write to him as ‘mon cher solitaire’, just as Voltaire avoided routine sycophancy by writing, with exaggerated deference, to Richelieu as ‘mon héros’.

English monasticism survived the Reformation only in exile. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many monks came to England as pastors to the Catholic community (indeed all members of the English Benedictine Congregation, revived at the beginning of the seventeenth century, took an oath promising to work in England after ordination), but they lived alone or in small groups and except during the early Stuart period there were no organised religious communities in England which could properly be called monastic. This state of affairs was to change dramatically in the years of the French Revolution when the English communities on the continent were repatriated and a number of French religious made their way to England as émigrés. The English communities (including those now represented by the abbeys of Ampleforth in Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset, formerly at Dieulouard in Lorraine and Douai in Flanders respectively) managed to settle in England without too much opposition. These monks had been trained for circumspect behaviour on the mission and were not noticeably ‘monastic’ in either appearance or behaviour; the complete Benedictine habit was not used at Downside, for example, until the late 1840s and working in parishes away from their monasteries remained the normal expectation of most English Benedictine monks until well into the present century. The same could not be said of the community of Saint Susan at Lulworth in Dorset which provided between the years 1794 and 1817 the setting for the first experiment in fully observant monastic life in England for two hundred and fifty years.

‘“Camelot-Camelot:” said I to myself “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”’ so said Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. But the irony is that the joke is now on Twain. In examining The Discovery of the Asylum, David J. Rothman has persuasively argued that the American asylum which developed in the 1820s and 1830s served a dual purpose. It would create the correct desirable attitudes within its inmates and by virtue of its success, set an example of right action to the larger society. The well-ordered asylum would exemplify the proper principles of social organisation and thus insure the safety of the republic and promote its glory. My purpose is to suggest that the monastery in Europe served a similar purpose. Europeans faced similar social and political problems to Americans and the rediscovery of monasticism paralleled the growth of American institutions and served a similar purpose in the public arena. In the process a more tolerant and sympathetic attitude towards religious orders emerged.

William John Butler, sometime vicar of Wantage in Berkshire and founder of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, gave a concrete and contemporary expression to an aspect of the ascetic idea current among followers of the Oxford Movement, which was revealed in their desire to restore monastic life in the Church in England. The Community founded by Butler was one of the earliest of the indigenous Anglican communities for women. In no way could the desert ideal or the later pre-Reformation models of religious life be reconstructed, nor would they have been appropriate in the climate of the time. However Butler believed, as had Newman, Pusey and others, that the basic principles of monastic life remained valid and they could and should find their place in the contemporary Church of England. It was believed that the Church had the grace and the resources of devotion within itself to give birth to the religious life anew, to continue its nurture and promote its development. Certainly the enhanced spirituality resulting from the example of deep devotion of the Tractarians themselves and that of their followers engendered a religious atmosphere in which new spiritual adventures were made possible.

Aelred Carlyle (1874–1955) believed that his vocation was to re-establish Benedictine monasticism in the Anglican Church. His early attempts in London and Gloucestershire failed, but in 1902 the future suddenly looked promising. During that year, he attracted the attention of Lord Halifax, who invited the small group of Anglican monks to settle at his estate in Yorkshire. Here, Carlyle’s foundation thrived: the membership grew; he enjoyed the support of influential Anglo-Catholics throughout Britain; and after he obtained the approval of the archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, for his revival of Benedictine life, Carlyle was ordained a priest in America. In 1906, the Anglican Benedictines moved to Caldey Island, where Carlyle planned to orchestrate the growth and spread of a grand congregation of Anglican monks.

The ascetic ideal found in wandering holy men in the east and in the self- and world-denying vows of regular clergy and laity in the middle ages came down to English nonconformity through puritanism. Bunyan’s pilgrim, like Benedict and Francis was passing through a temporary and evil world. Their attitude to life was that of the Sermon on the Mount, on the lips of the shepherd lad:

‘I am content with what I have,
Little be it, or much.‘

Wesley blended the high Anglican discipline of Jeremy Taylor and the Oxford Holy Club with his field evangelism and exhorted his Methodists to ‘Gain all you can; save all you can; then give all all you can.’ The gain was to be without doing harm to anyone. The Methodist was ‘to despise delicacy and variety, and be content with what plain nature requires.’ He was to ‘waste no part of it … in costly pictures, painting, gilding, books; in elegant rather than useful gardens.’ The Methodist was to avoid sensuality, curiosity and vanity. Wesley’s sermon on ‘The use of money’ is regularly quoted and is required reading for every Methodist preacher.

Methodism … left a stigma on the mind of the eighteenth-century poor whilst helping at the same time to smother the growth of a working-class consciousness. Its doctrines perverted all that was healthy in men’s emotions, its creed was cruel and grim, its view of life bleak and joyless. Its place in society closely resembled that of a malignant tumour.

Thus a Sheffield undergraduate essayist, year of 1983. The essayist was Methodist bred. For him liberation lay in bondage to E. P. Thompson, year of 1963. His student vigour is as much to be applauded as his interpretation is to be deplored. For him as for so many much older historians the bold stroke or the broad view has become in fact a sweeping into tunnel vision and the emancipation has become in fact a confirmation of old folk wisdom: Methodism is puritanism is repressive is reprehensible. We come very close to the heart of the present volume’s matter: asceticism, or the attainment of spiritual perfection by means of self-discipline. Or at least we come very close to the heart of the matter as it is vulgarly seen, for although asceticism is not a word which is too frequently applied to English protestant Dissent, its associations with discipline, abstinence and repression are far too frequently so applied.