Quakers in the Dunster and Minehead Area

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EARLY QUAKERS IN THE DUNSTER AND MINEHEAD AREA

Quakers in Alcombe and Dunster

At least three of the Dunster families whose houses were licensed for worship between 1701 and 1711 were buried in the Quaker burial ground at Alcombe, assigned to trustees by Susanna Turner whose house had been licensed in 1711 and walled in 1717 at a cost of £100. Between 1741 and 1771 35 people were buried there.1 New trustees were appointed in 1775 but it appears to have been disused by

18302 and by 1846 was partly assigned to the Wesleyans.3

Quakers in Minehead

In 1656 merchant William Alloway opened his home as a meeting place for Friends and he may have entertained George Fox in 1668. Minehead was one of the meetings to receive part of Fox’s library in

1694. Quakers were recorded at Minehead throughout the late 17th century when several were imprisoned for non attendance at church including Susannah wife of William Alloway in 1683.

Fortnightly meetings were held by 1688 and in 1689 a new meeting house had been built by Alloway and licensed for worship.4 This was probably the meeting house with burial ground on the north side of Market Place, later a school and then a fire station.

1 SHC, Q/RRw 1; DD/SFR.w 33. 2 J. Savage, History of the Hundred of Carhampton (1830), 448. 3 SHC, DD/SFR.w 33, 40; see Methodism asset. 4 S. C. Morland, The Som. Quarterly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Som. Rec. Soc. 75), 57, 59, 69, 82, 137, 186, 195, 204, 233; Persecution Exposed…the sufferings of John Whiting and others of the people called Quakers, the West of England (1791 edn), 201—2, 230, 474.

Mary Siraut Page 1 Somerset Reference In the early 18th century Friends rented a building in Bampton Street on the corner of the Butts, later

Selbourne Place, next to the later convent of St Louis. In 1701—4 Quaker burials were recorded in the parish register but by the 1740s births, marriages and deaths were recorded by merchant Robert Davis who also kept the meeting accounts and burials were probably at Alcombe ground. By 1740 both properties were said to have been given up5 but a Quaker meeting house was recorded in 1744, the

1780s although by then there were only two Quaker families in the parish, and 1820, when it was said to be a barn.6 The last recorded Quaker burials were in the 1780s and remains found in the Market

Place site 1921 were re-interred in the churchyard.7 Two young members of the Minehead meeting were Richard Brocklesbury, later physician to Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Young, grandson of

Robert Davis, doctor and Egyptologist.8

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5 SHC, DD/SFRw 33. 6 SHC, A/AQP 8; ibid. D/D/Vc 88; D/P/m.st.m. 13/1/1. 7 SHC, DD/SFRw 33. 8 M. V. Sully, ‘Quakers in Minehead’, Exmoor Review, 1997, 33—4.

Mary Siraut Page 2 Somerset Reference