When the Quakers came to Cavan

Edmundson brought the Quaker religion to Cavan

At Mountmellick Co. Laois, on a memorial stone in the Quaker’s burial ground there is the inscription: ‘Near this spot is buried William Edmundson, the first member of the Society of Friends who settled in Ireland, died 31st of the 6th month 1712, aged nearly 85 years.’

At one time, Mountmellick was known as the Manchester of Ireland because of its access to the Grand Canal and the Quaker operated spinning, weaving, malting and brewing industries which enriched the region. Before making Mountmellick his permanent home, Edmundson brought the Quaker religion to Cavan and briefly settled in the county where he farmed and planned to form a community. His reception in Cavan was less inviting than he imagined it would be.

Edmundson hailed from Westmoreland, in the north of England, was orphaned as a child, was reared by his uncle, and became a carpenter’s apprentice at 13 years old. Both William and his brother John joined Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentary army and fought against the Scottish royalists between 1650 and 1651. The Edmundson brothers were then sent to fight the Irish allies of the royalists and soon William left the army having found fighting too unpleasant.

English families were actively encouraged to settle in Ireland and William, along with his wife Margaret went to live in Co. Antrim where his brother John was living. William had become enamoured with the Quaker message and frequently travelled back to England where the Society of Friends were already holding meetings and it was a speaker named John Naylor who was to change William Edmundson’s life and on his return to Ireland, he took with him the Quaker message and a desire to spread the message. In 1654, both he and his wife opened a drapery store in Lurgan, Co. Armagh and in the same town began the first-ever Quaker meeting to take place in Ireland.

Life was not easy for the first ‘Friends’, and they were often punished for their beliefs and with this in mind, the Emundsons closed the shop and looked to taking up farming and establishing a community in Co. Cavan where they hoped life would improve. The Quakers refused to pay tithes: a church tax payable by law to the then established church.

They approached a Cavan landowner Colonel Kempston of Drumurry, near Trinity Island, in 1655 who agreed with their principles and permitted them to rent farmland but he did not join their community. Edmundson wrote in his journal, ‘it came weightily upon me to leave shop-keeping and take a farm, to be an example in the testimony against tithes; for as yet that was not yet broken through, few, if any, stood in that testimony in this nation.’ Life in Cavan looked promising at the beginning, but it was not to be.

Olive Goodbody, in her history of the Irish Friends described the story of Edmundson and the land he leased as having been ‘sparsely documented.’ From her own investigation in the early 1960s, she was certain that Trinity Island was the first place in Cavan that the Quakers settled. She met with Hugh Gough who produced a map by William Petty and pointed out the Kempston property. She described the feeling both she and her husband felt when they visited Trinity Island: ‘The intense quiet of the place, broken only by the shrill cries of seabirds, so far from the coast, made us feel as if there had been a continuity in the peace and quiet which pervaded all, as if our early Friends had left a sense of harmony to continue through the ages.’

In Edmundson’s, ‘A Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings and Labour of Love in the work of the Ministry, of that worthy elder and faithful servant of Jesus Christ’, he tells of his shocking experience in Cavan jail where he was locked in a ‘nasty dungeon’ amongst ‘thieves and robbers.’

The roof overhead was arched, and the voices of the prisoners made the place very noisy and on top of the echo was the stench of excrement. Each day the prisoners had the ‘benefit of looking out from an iron grate from where they begged for turf from the people passing and by night, they lit a fire in the jail. A door was closed over the iron grate each evening and Edmundson described it as though they were closed into an oven from which the smoke could not escape.

Edmundson who found the smoke overwhelming, supposed that his cellmates were seasoned to it ‘being used to it in their cabins.’ Then one evening he collapsed, and a cry went out for help and the ‘gaoler’ flung open the door and flew into a ‘rage’ supposing the others had killed the unfortunate Quaker. As soon as the gaoler learned the reason for the Edmundson’s collapse he threw a ‘pale’ of water on the fire and from then on did not allow a large fire to be lit.

Fourteen weeks of prison passed before Edmundson was to receive any kind of a hearing and he recalled that when the assizes ‘came’, he was looking out from the iron grate when William Moore, one of the justices of the peace who had him committed to prison came up to him and announced ‘he was very sorry to see’ him still there and how he had ‘been many times troubled in his mind’ having placed him behind bars. At this stage the prisoner reeked from the smell of the place and his clothes were by now filthy and when his family came to see him through the iron grate they had to turn away because of the noxious odour.

After much pleading from Edmundson, he was allowed to appear before the judge and when he did, he announced to all, ‘I am a prisoner, and have been a close prisoner fourteen weeks, for my religion and faith towards God, and I want justice, and to be tried by the law now established.’ The judge asked that the prisoner be taken away and on the day after, Edmundson was let go without trial.

After his ordeal, William took his family and his cattle from Cavan and moved to Rossenallis, Mountmellick. He recalled in his journal that the farmland leased in Cavan was ‘recovered’ from him by the law under a man named Cosby. However, a Quaker community was established in Cootehill which survived until the early 1900s.