Tag Archives: Quaker

Quick, write it down

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Steel1678_01_detail

This detail is from the title page of a teach-yourself shorthand manual entitled Short Writing, Begun by Nature, Compleated by Art, written by a Bristol Quaker schoolmaster named Laurence Steel and published in 1678. It was not the first – stenography handbooks promoting various systems were published throughout the 1600s (and shorthand was already in use centuries earlier, in Ancient Greece and then in China, according to Wikipedia).

But early Quakers had particular reason to want a means to record speech verbatim. They were repeatedly arrested and brought to trial under laws designed to suppress religious dissent; they argued their cases tirelessly in court, and evidently produced verbatim records of proceedings against them, since some of these were published. I don’t know if any such shorthand manuscripts have survived, either by Quakers or from the thriving commercial publication of state treason trials. The best-known contemporary user of shorthand was Samuel Pepys, for his own reasons.

Steel’s handbook with its gloopy script is printed entirely from engraved plates using a rolling press, rather than from movable type on a common press – the ordinary wooden press used then for printing books – and its unnamed printer was not Andrew Sowle, the Friends’ own printer. The latter did however have extensive personal experience of harrassment and prosecution by government, and his daughters and apprentices were themselves resistant to constraint in various ways. Andrew Sowle endured repeated imprisonment, break-up of his press and types and seizure of his stock for seditious printing. His daughter Tace succeeded him and ran the press for half a century. His first apprentice fled to Amsterdam after printing the rebel Duke of Monmouth’s manifesto, and may also have been William of Orange’s printer in Exeter; his eldest daughter married another Sowle apprentice and with him became notorious for press piracy; another daughter married a third apprentice and emigrated with him to set up the first press in Philadelphia, where they fell out with a new Quaker establishment.

Some time back I started writing a blogpost about this clan of unstoppable printers, but the word-count shot up to something unfeasible almost at once. So now it’s a book, called Dissenting printers, and has its own page in the menu bar.

Steel1678_01_comp

An unsilent woman

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Tace Sowle's signature
Signature on a 1696 indenture (held at London Metropolitan Archives)

Tace was almost unknown as a given name in London before the Quaker printer Andrew Sowle and his wife named their fourth daughter in 1666. It was a little less rare elsewhere; it crops up from the 1540s in the earliest Church of England registers, notably in Gloucestershire and the west. Andrew’s mother was baptised Tace in the small village of Winstone, near Cirencester, in 1603, and his sister also bore the name. His father Francis moved the family to Smithfield on the edge of the city of London in the 1640s, and it was in London that Andrew raised his own family. After that, the name proliferated throughout their extended clan.

Tace is from the Latin meaning ‘be silent’, and the rural parishes where it appeared were mostly in parts of the country where religious dissent flourished. William Camden knew it: in Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britain (1605) he lists it as a Christian name for women, with the comment: ‘Be silent, a fitte name to admonish that sex of silence’. It has an air about it of a Puritan name, but as an emblem of  anti-episcopal belief it is in the wrong language. In English, as Silence, it occurs from early in the seventeenth century, mainly in Yorkshire.

An older potential source for the name is Gesta Romanorum, a medieval compendium of tales and fragments which was mined for plots by numerous writers, and for parables by sermonising clerics. The story there of the Three Cocks contains the rhyme ‘Audi vide tace si vis vivere pace’ (hear, see and be silent, if you want to live in peace): a suitable motto for dissenters hoping to keep a low profile, you might think, although the name itself would tend to have the opposite effect. Printed Latin editions of Gesta Romanorum first appeared in the 1470s; Chaucer knew the story a century before that and used it in the Manciple’s Tale. Needless to say, it was almost exclusively girls who had this obligation to silence conferred on them by baptism, although audi vide tace was later taken up as a motto by English freemasons.

Masonic Hall, Teignmouth, Devon
Masonic Hall, Teignmouth, Devon

In parish registers you can sometimes catch the sound of names from three or four centuries ago, when a clerk has spelled an unfamiliar name as it was spoken to him; this one was pronounced Tacey. Others would have recognised its source and known the meaning. The Quakers were viewed with curiosity and usually derision for their practice of having women preachers, and in the late 1600s there was a genre of satirical prints which showed a woman standing on a tub to speak at a Quaker meeting. An inscription under one of these, in the decade when Tace Sowle took over her father’s press, includes what may be a direct reference to her:

Flusht with Conceit (which she the Spirit calls)
Upon a Tub see how Dame Silence bawls
Whilst Dunghill Cocks in a most pious strain
Listen to heare the Cackling of the Hen

As it happens Tace was not a preacher, but she published other women who were, and as a resourceful printer and bookseller she had considerable heft. There are no portraits, but her signature suggests fluent self-confidence. The print below depicts a generic repellent–ridiculous preacher-woman; though less of a caricature than some (no dog cocking its leg on her skirt), it cannot be a likeness.

The Quakers Meeting by Marcel Lauron after Egbert van Heemskerk, 1690s [Library of the Society of Friends]
The Quakers Meeting, by Marcel Lauron after Egbert van Heemskerk, 1690s [image: Library of the Society of Friends]

The tone of the attack on Dame Silence is a startling reminder of the fearful misogyny paraded by 21st-century internet trolls – which would make Tace Sowle a forerunner of Mary Beard, Caroline Criado-Perez, Lindy West and a great many other women who make themselves heard now. There is more about her as a printer in this post.