THE MEETING to 1800
The Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, came into being during the tumultuous period of upheaval that is now referred to as the English civil war. In an age when the whole structure of society appeared to fall apart, it is not surprising to find as much upheaval in religious practice as there was in politics. Religious sects appeared to spring up everywhere almost overnight, each producing its own prophets and evangelists, and each seeking converts now that the Established Church, the Church of England, had been overthrown.
Most of these sects, be they Baptists, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters or Seekers, had one central idea that coloured much of their thinking - the end of the world was at hand! Their reasoning was simple: God had created the monarchy and the structure of society that went with it. Now that it was gone, the last days had arrived and the second coming of Jesus Christ was imminent.
This idea, far-fetched to us today, has to be assimilated if we are to understand the strong emotions governing religious behaviour during the period 1645 - 1660. It also helps us to understand some of the more extreme behaviour of individuals when they worshipped or 'went naked as a sign’. Fear, coupled with a desire for salvation, made men and women not only anxious to save themselves, but also to save as many of the ungodly as possible.
Similar extreme religious behaviour occurred at other times of political or social upheaval, particularly during the Black Death and during the Great Plague of London in 1655. However, it would be unwise to imagine that the appearance of new religious sects resulted solely from a fear of Armageddon. Protestantism had already led the Church of England to break from Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, in turn, had produced several systems of belief of its own. Nationalism, coupled with the Revival of Learning during the Renaissance, had made many think and speculate about religion and God's intentions for his creation. Moreover, after the invention of the printing press and translations into the vernacular, people could read the Bible for themselves in their own language in their own homes. They were also free to interpret it and many were able to find evidence that went against their experience of their daily lives and the way that society was ordered.
Quakers, in particular, became associated with some very specific social ideas that caused more outrage than their religious ideas. As Christopher Hill points out in The World Turned Upside Down, Quakers were regarded as dangerous because they not only abandoned standard forms of social behaviour like 'hat honour' (removing one's hat as a sign of respect) and the use of polite language, but they also attacked 'steeple houses' (churches) and ‘hireling priests’ (the established clergy) and refused to pay tithes (the tenth of produce which went towards supporting the clergy).
Our story, however, is about how Quakerism came to Bewdley 300 years ago and how it was sustained there. We need to know something of the general state of upheaval in England in order that we can imagine the uncertainty that must have existed everywhere and how people must have felt about the competing evangelists, 'prophets' and preachers who journeyed into their midst in order to covert and 'save' them. This mood, as we have seen, was particularly acute from 1645-1660 and it was during this period that the new religious sects tended to move out of their strongholds and evangelise other parts of the country. Baptism, for example, was particularly strong in Wales, but in 1654, one of its founders, Hugh Peters, decided that Herefordshire and Worcestershire were "ripe for the Gospel". Similarly, Quakerism, which was strong in the North of England, sent its ministers south in 1654and great progress was made in Cornwall and Gloucestershire.
What all these 'evangelists' brought to Worcestershire was something that was common everywhere they went: mass meetings in the open air and some demonstrations of extreme behaviour. This led to a deep suspicion on the part of the authorities that the sects were fronts for violent revolutionaries and their growth was marked by attempts by magistrates to prohibit open-air meetings and punish any form of extreme behaviour. When William Simpson ran naked through the streets of Evesham as "a prophetic warning to the people” and when a large meeting of Quakers was held in an orchard at Clifton-on-Teme in 1657, it is easy to see how close to anarchy the new religious practices appeared to be to those in authority.
Quakers, however, could be seen as all the more dangerous since they challenged ministers in their own churches, using an established right to speak to dispute traditional theology and accepted practices. This led, inevitably, to their being imprisoned for such actions. Margaret Newby and Elizabeth Cowart were imprisoned at Bewdley in1655 and in 1659 Elizabeth Deane received three days imprisonment in Bewdley for speaking out against Henry Roseland, a Church of England priest. Robert Nader, a Quaker, was imprisoned in the same year for challenging Richard Baxter in St. Mary’s Church, Kidderminster.
We do not know, however, where these early Friends were based. Although Quaker meetings were quickly established in Bromsgrove, Worcester, Pershore, Redditch, Evesham, Droitwich and Bewdley, there are no records of where Friends met or what form their meetings took. It is highly likely that there was a great deal of mobility involved and that some Friends travelled from place to place in order to spread their message throughout the county. For example, Margaret Newby and Elizabeth Deane had already spent fifteen hours in the stocks at Evesham a few months before they were imprisoned in Bewdley.
It is also difficult to distinguish Quaker proselytizing in those days from the other extreme behaviour apparent in other religious groups. The Hereford and Worcester Quarter Sessions Records for these years reveal a large number of prosecutions against religious dissenters. These ranged from those who simply made anti-establishment speeches to a group of Anabaptists indicted for trying to bury a body themselves without any form of acceptable religious service.
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 enabled the authorities to crack down on all religious dissent and to restore the status quo. The Church of England became the Established Church again and the corporation Act of 1661 gave power to local commissions to displace radicals who refused to swear the oath of supremacy and the oath of allegiance. Between 1660-1661, forty-seven Quakers were imprisoned in Worcester Gaol for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. By 1662-63 Quakers from all areas known to have meetings were being imprisoned for attending meetings unlawfully or failing to swear the appropriate oath.
This is not to say that such imprisonments were wholesale or that the motive behind them was religious persecution. In the early years of the Restoration it is clear that the King's intention was to root out political radicals and after he had broken the back of radicalism he was prepared to be merciful. Evidence of this can be found in a letter in which the King and privy Council asked for the names of prisoners deserving clemency, “particularly of that sort of people called Quakers, with your opinion of them concerning them respectively, who of them may be fit objects of his majesty's mercy and who are ring-leaders of faction."
If the reader is now feeling a little suspicions of the behaviour and intentions of early Worcestershire Quakers, she is no doubt feeling what many of their contemporaries felt. Quaker meetings had apparently appeared out of nowhere and although Quakers were known to be religious, their behaviour must have seemed both bizarre and anti-establishment. However, we do not know much about the manner they worshipped or how many adhered to their convictions once Quakers were liable to imprisonment and heavy fines. For by the 1680s, Quakers nor only stood to be imprisoned under the Corporation Act, but under the Clarendon Code, they were excluded from political life and municipal administration. Action was also taken against Quakers who were absent from Church of England Worship and fines for such absences in 1633 totalled £33,000 for that year alone.
It is not surprising then that the first reference to Bewdley Meeting comes in a document written in Latin by an informer, Thomas Griffin, in 1678. In his memorandum, Griffin names the entire Quakers meeting at the house of Jacob Cotterell, currier, "...near the River Severn in Bewd1ey". Apart from a nucleus of Bewdley residents, however, most Friends (another word for Quakers) at the meeting came from other towns and villages some distance away, including Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. From the professions listed it is clear that these Friends were mostly tradespeople.
It was, of course, quite common for Quakers to meet in private houses during this period and so the Bewdley Meeting may have been in existence for some years. Worcester Friends, for example, were meeting in Edward Bourne's house in Worcester in 1673. Nevertheless, it is also true that Jacob Cotterell, (1648-1730) had not arrived in the town until 1670 and he does appear to be the driving force behind the gathering together of Bewdley Quakers into a pattern of regular weekly meetings.
There was, however, another dominant Quaker influence in the area, that of the Mucklow family of Areley Hall, Areley Kings near Stourport. The Mucklows were descended from a family of Worcestershire merchants in the 15th century who acquired the Manor of Martley (which included Areley Kings). L.C. Doncaster, who has written a history of the family, tells us that during the Civil War, William Mucklow was a major-general in the royalist army and was ruined when the Roundheads came to power. In 1655 the family was fined £1000 and probably paid for this with the proceeds of the sale of the manor of Martley in 1654.
William Mucklow junior, the heir to the estate, became a Quaker in London in 1652, although under what circumstances we do not know. He was also arrested and imprisoned for attending a Meeting for Worship at Jordans in 1670. He was not, however estranged from his father’s affections and it is probably through William Mucklow junior’s influence that two of the tenants of Areley Manor became Quakers. For amongst the first members of Bewdley Meeting in 1691 were Daniel Tipper, carpenter and William Sankey, husbandman (working farmer) of Areley Kings.
Although William Mucklow junior let Areley Hall to Thomas Crane in 1675 and moved to London, his son, Selby Mucklow, continued to visit the estate and attended meetings for worship at Bewdley after the present Meeting House was built. The Quaker estate tenants who remained appear to have been strong in their faith and resolution - for William Sankey was imprisoned in. Worcester Castle in 1587 for refusing to pay tithes and Daniel Tipper was imprisoned there in 1695.
It is probably through the coming together of Quakers from Areley Kings and those from Bewdley that a formal Meeting became established, despite being an odd mixture of agricultural workers and Bewdley traders. When the Toleration Act was passed in May 1689, Friends could be open about their meetings so long as they registered the houses where they met. In October 1689 Jacob Cotterell wrote to the county’s justices of the peace to register his home as a meeting place. He informed them that:
"... ye people called Quakers in and about Bewdley.... frequently meet together in worship and praise of God upon ye first and fourth days weekly commonly called Sunday and Wednesday at the house of habitation of Jacob Cotterell, currier. in Bewdley.”
One of the signatories of the letter was Thomas Milner, an iron merchant, who has been claimed as the first known Bewdley Quaker, although the evidence for this statement has not been found. It was Thomas Milner who negotiated a 1000-year lease of a dwelling house and piece of land belonging to Humphrey Taylor (another iron merchant) on which to build a meeting house (so-called because Quakers did not accept the word 'church').
By November 1691, the Meeting House had been erected and Friends purchased a small tenement and pig sty adjacent to the meeting house and demolished them. The exact date the building works were completed is unknown, neither is the date of the first meeting for worship to be held there. The choice of the site for the Meeting House is an interesting one since it lay away from the town centre and the present main entrance did not exist. The motivation for building it there was probably to ensure privacy and to have sufficient space for a burial ground. It was probably no coincidence either that Thomas Milner leased the land from a fellow iron merchant since he was likely to be more amenable to a lease than major local landowners, the majority of whom were members of the Church of England.
However, there were other reasons for siting the Meeting House outside the town centre. We have to remember that it was built very shortly after the Toleration Act was passed and there was no knowing then how long toleration would last. Friends still had their enemies and an interesting tombstone in Areley King's church, near Stourport, claims that William Walsh, the man buried there, was "ruinated by three Quakers, three Lawyers, and a Fanatic to help them." We do not, unfortunately, know the background to this interesting accusation.
The Meeting House, in effect, is an unobtrusive building built of local brick, with leaded windows which still contain some small panes of the original glass. To point out its interesting features, however, would be rather ironic to early Quakers, whose interests lay in a place of worship in rather than in niceties of style. It is worth pointing out, perhaps, that the interior of the building does possess its original gallery and that the wooden walls that divide the porch from the main building are hinged, to allow the Meeting House space to be extended into the porch area when necessary. The windows have interior shutters and no doubt their original purpose was both to stop Quakers being distracted during worship and to stop curious non-Quakers from peering in.
The present layout is not, however, the original one and the visitor might notice the bricked up fireplace - a sign of how cold the building could be. Nowadays, the Meeting relies on central heating. The Meeting House has no form of decoration and the only noticeable feature on First Day (Sunday) is the vase of flowers that stands on the table in the centre of the room used for worship.
The Meeting House garden is, in practical terms, the burial ground and some gravestones can be seen. The earliest Quakers, however, were buried in unmarked graves and even when gravestones were permitted, all had to be plain and uniform. Modern practice, however, tends to favour cremation and the resting place of Friends' ashes is indicated by small, plain memorial plaques. There was for a brief time a tradition in Bewdley Meeting of planting trees in memory of deceased members of the Meeting.
The mainstays of the early Meeting were probably the Cotterell family, particularly as many families of Bewdley Quakers appear to have disappeared in the early eighteenth century. It is probable that most went to America to join William Penn's new colony of Pennsylvania (founded 1681). The Cotterells, however, were established as prosperous tradespeople and Jacob Cottrell’s son; Benjamin (1692-1778) became a warehouse owner, owning premises in Bristol as well as Bewdley. It was Benjamin Cotterell who built the handsome Queen Anne house at the beginning of Stourport Road, now a block of flats. It can easily be identified by the front drainpipe which is dated 1753 at the top.
His son, Benjamin Cotterell junior (born 1740) was a famous local character. Reputed to be "the best swimmer in England", this Benjamin Cotterell was a great practical joker as well as being a man of enormous strength. He would often take early morning rambles and go into neighbours’ houses for a gossip before breakfast. If no one were there he would eat the buttered toast left warming at the fire and leave a cinder in its place - presumably indicating that the toast had been left warming for too long!
The Cotterells also became increasingly wealthy and the rent roll of their Bewdley property was said to bring them £2000 a year. The prosperity of Friends belonging to the early Meeting enabled them to buy land to make a roadway to the Meeting House in 1781. There were, by then, several rights of way to the Meeting House, but these became the subject of dispute from time to time and one door into an adjoining property proved such a source of annoyance to the occupant that a Wesleyan minister put a bolt on the door in 1867 and informed Friends that this had been done to stop the ' children from the house straying into the Meeting House grounds’. It is likely, however, that the owner of the property was simply tired of Friends entering through his garden. This entrance has long since been bricked off.
The Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, came into being during the tumultuous period of upheaval that is now referred to as the English civil war. In an age when the whole structure of society appeared to fall apart, it is not surprising to find as much upheaval in religious practice as there was in politics. Religious sects appeared to spring up everywhere almost overnight, each producing its own prophets and evangelists, and each seeking converts now that the Established Church, the Church of England, had been overthrown.
Most of these sects, be they Baptists, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters or Seekers, had one central idea that coloured much of their thinking - the end of the world was at hand! Their reasoning was simple: God had created the monarchy and the structure of society that went with it. Now that it was gone, the last days had arrived and the second coming of Jesus Christ was imminent.
This idea, far-fetched to us today, has to be assimilated if we are to understand the strong emotions governing religious behaviour during the period 1645 - 1660. It also helps us to understand some of the more extreme behaviour of individuals when they worshipped or 'went naked as a sign’. Fear, coupled with a desire for salvation, made men and women not only anxious to save themselves, but also to save as many of the ungodly as possible.
Similar extreme religious behaviour occurred at other times of political or social upheaval, particularly during the Black Death and during the Great Plague of London in 1655. However, it would be unwise to imagine that the appearance of new religious sects resulted solely from a fear of Armageddon. Protestantism had already led the Church of England to break from Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, in turn, had produced several systems of belief of its own. Nationalism, coupled with the Revival of Learning during the Renaissance, had made many think and speculate about religion and God's intentions for his creation. Moreover, after the invention of the printing press and translations into the vernacular, people could read the Bible for themselves in their own language in their own homes. They were also free to interpret it and many were able to find evidence that went against their experience of their daily lives and the way that society was ordered.
Quakers, in particular, became associated with some very specific social ideas that caused more outrage than their religious ideas. As Christopher Hill points out in The World Turned Upside Down, Quakers were regarded as dangerous because they not only abandoned standard forms of social behaviour like 'hat honour' (removing one's hat as a sign of respect) and the use of polite language, but they also attacked 'steeple houses' (churches) and ‘hireling priests’ (the established clergy) and refused to pay tithes (the tenth of produce which went towards supporting the clergy).
Our story, however, is about how Quakerism came to Bewdley 300 years ago and how it was sustained there. We need to know something of the general state of upheaval in England in order that we can imagine the uncertainty that must have existed everywhere and how people must have felt about the competing evangelists, 'prophets' and preachers who journeyed into their midst in order to covert and 'save' them. This mood, as we have seen, was particularly acute from 1645-1660 and it was during this period that the new religious sects tended to move out of their strongholds and evangelise other parts of the country. Baptism, for example, was particularly strong in Wales, but in 1654, one of its founders, Hugh Peters, decided that Herefordshire and Worcestershire were "ripe for the Gospel". Similarly, Quakerism, which was strong in the North of England, sent its ministers south in 1654and great progress was made in Cornwall and Gloucestershire.
What all these 'evangelists' brought to Worcestershire was something that was common everywhere they went: mass meetings in the open air and some demonstrations of extreme behaviour. This led to a deep suspicion on the part of the authorities that the sects were fronts for violent revolutionaries and their growth was marked by attempts by magistrates to prohibit open-air meetings and punish any form of extreme behaviour. When William Simpson ran naked through the streets of Evesham as "a prophetic warning to the people” and when a large meeting of Quakers was held in an orchard at Clifton-on-Teme in 1657, it is easy to see how close to anarchy the new religious practices appeared to be to those in authority.
Quakers, however, could be seen as all the more dangerous since they challenged ministers in their own churches, using an established right to speak to dispute traditional theology and accepted practices. This led, inevitably, to their being imprisoned for such actions. Margaret Newby and Elizabeth Cowart were imprisoned at Bewdley in1655 and in 1659 Elizabeth Deane received three days imprisonment in Bewdley for speaking out against Henry Roseland, a Church of England priest. Robert Nader, a Quaker, was imprisoned in the same year for challenging Richard Baxter in St. Mary’s Church, Kidderminster.
We do not know, however, where these early Friends were based. Although Quaker meetings were quickly established in Bromsgrove, Worcester, Pershore, Redditch, Evesham, Droitwich and Bewdley, there are no records of where Friends met or what form their meetings took. It is highly likely that there was a great deal of mobility involved and that some Friends travelled from place to place in order to spread their message throughout the county. For example, Margaret Newby and Elizabeth Deane had already spent fifteen hours in the stocks at Evesham a few months before they were imprisoned in Bewdley.
It is also difficult to distinguish Quaker proselytizing in those days from the other extreme behaviour apparent in other religious groups. The Hereford and Worcester Quarter Sessions Records for these years reveal a large number of prosecutions against religious dissenters. These ranged from those who simply made anti-establishment speeches to a group of Anabaptists indicted for trying to bury a body themselves without any form of acceptable religious service.
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 enabled the authorities to crack down on all religious dissent and to restore the status quo. The Church of England became the Established Church again and the corporation Act of 1661 gave power to local commissions to displace radicals who refused to swear the oath of supremacy and the oath of allegiance. Between 1660-1661, forty-seven Quakers were imprisoned in Worcester Gaol for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. By 1662-63 Quakers from all areas known to have meetings were being imprisoned for attending meetings unlawfully or failing to swear the appropriate oath.
This is not to say that such imprisonments were wholesale or that the motive behind them was religious persecution. In the early years of the Restoration it is clear that the King's intention was to root out political radicals and after he had broken the back of radicalism he was prepared to be merciful. Evidence of this can be found in a letter in which the King and privy Council asked for the names of prisoners deserving clemency, “particularly of that sort of people called Quakers, with your opinion of them concerning them respectively, who of them may be fit objects of his majesty's mercy and who are ring-leaders of faction."
If the reader is now feeling a little suspicions of the behaviour and intentions of early Worcestershire Quakers, she is no doubt feeling what many of their contemporaries felt. Quaker meetings had apparently appeared out of nowhere and although Quakers were known to be religious, their behaviour must have seemed both bizarre and anti-establishment. However, we do not know much about the manner they worshipped or how many adhered to their convictions once Quakers were liable to imprisonment and heavy fines. For by the 1680s, Quakers nor only stood to be imprisoned under the Corporation Act, but under the Clarendon Code, they were excluded from political life and municipal administration. Action was also taken against Quakers who were absent from Church of England Worship and fines for such absences in 1633 totalled £33,000 for that year alone.
It is not surprising then that the first reference to Bewdley Meeting comes in a document written in Latin by an informer, Thomas Griffin, in 1678. In his memorandum, Griffin names the entire Quakers meeting at the house of Jacob Cotterell, currier, "...near the River Severn in Bewd1ey". Apart from a nucleus of Bewdley residents, however, most Friends (another word for Quakers) at the meeting came from other towns and villages some distance away, including Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. From the professions listed it is clear that these Friends were mostly tradespeople.
It was, of course, quite common for Quakers to meet in private houses during this period and so the Bewdley Meeting may have been in existence for some years. Worcester Friends, for example, were meeting in Edward Bourne's house in Worcester in 1673. Nevertheless, it is also true that Jacob Cotterell, (1648-1730) had not arrived in the town until 1670 and he does appear to be the driving force behind the gathering together of Bewdley Quakers into a pattern of regular weekly meetings.
There was, however, another dominant Quaker influence in the area, that of the Mucklow family of Areley Hall, Areley Kings near Stourport. The Mucklows were descended from a family of Worcestershire merchants in the 15th century who acquired the Manor of Martley (which included Areley Kings). L.C. Doncaster, who has written a history of the family, tells us that during the Civil War, William Mucklow was a major-general in the royalist army and was ruined when the Roundheads came to power. In 1655 the family was fined £1000 and probably paid for this with the proceeds of the sale of the manor of Martley in 1654.
William Mucklow junior, the heir to the estate, became a Quaker in London in 1652, although under what circumstances we do not know. He was also arrested and imprisoned for attending a Meeting for Worship at Jordans in 1670. He was not, however estranged from his father’s affections and it is probably through William Mucklow junior’s influence that two of the tenants of Areley Manor became Quakers. For amongst the first members of Bewdley Meeting in 1691 were Daniel Tipper, carpenter and William Sankey, husbandman (working farmer) of Areley Kings.
Although William Mucklow junior let Areley Hall to Thomas Crane in 1675 and moved to London, his son, Selby Mucklow, continued to visit the estate and attended meetings for worship at Bewdley after the present Meeting House was built. The Quaker estate tenants who remained appear to have been strong in their faith and resolution - for William Sankey was imprisoned in. Worcester Castle in 1587 for refusing to pay tithes and Daniel Tipper was imprisoned there in 1695.
It is probably through the coming together of Quakers from Areley Kings and those from Bewdley that a formal Meeting became established, despite being an odd mixture of agricultural workers and Bewdley traders. When the Toleration Act was passed in May 1689, Friends could be open about their meetings so long as they registered the houses where they met. In October 1689 Jacob Cotterell wrote to the county’s justices of the peace to register his home as a meeting place. He informed them that:
"... ye people called Quakers in and about Bewdley.... frequently meet together in worship and praise of God upon ye first and fourth days weekly commonly called Sunday and Wednesday at the house of habitation of Jacob Cotterell, currier. in Bewdley.”
One of the signatories of the letter was Thomas Milner, an iron merchant, who has been claimed as the first known Bewdley Quaker, although the evidence for this statement has not been found. It was Thomas Milner who negotiated a 1000-year lease of a dwelling house and piece of land belonging to Humphrey Taylor (another iron merchant) on which to build a meeting house (so-called because Quakers did not accept the word 'church').
By November 1691, the Meeting House had been erected and Friends purchased a small tenement and pig sty adjacent to the meeting house and demolished them. The exact date the building works were completed is unknown, neither is the date of the first meeting for worship to be held there. The choice of the site for the Meeting House is an interesting one since it lay away from the town centre and the present main entrance did not exist. The motivation for building it there was probably to ensure privacy and to have sufficient space for a burial ground. It was probably no coincidence either that Thomas Milner leased the land from a fellow iron merchant since he was likely to be more amenable to a lease than major local landowners, the majority of whom were members of the Church of England.
However, there were other reasons for siting the Meeting House outside the town centre. We have to remember that it was built very shortly after the Toleration Act was passed and there was no knowing then how long toleration would last. Friends still had their enemies and an interesting tombstone in Areley King's church, near Stourport, claims that William Walsh, the man buried there, was "ruinated by three Quakers, three Lawyers, and a Fanatic to help them." We do not, unfortunately, know the background to this interesting accusation.
The Meeting House, in effect, is an unobtrusive building built of local brick, with leaded windows which still contain some small panes of the original glass. To point out its interesting features, however, would be rather ironic to early Quakers, whose interests lay in a place of worship in rather than in niceties of style. It is worth pointing out, perhaps, that the interior of the building does possess its original gallery and that the wooden walls that divide the porch from the main building are hinged, to allow the Meeting House space to be extended into the porch area when necessary. The windows have interior shutters and no doubt their original purpose was both to stop Quakers being distracted during worship and to stop curious non-Quakers from peering in.
The present layout is not, however, the original one and the visitor might notice the bricked up fireplace - a sign of how cold the building could be. Nowadays, the Meeting relies on central heating. The Meeting House has no form of decoration and the only noticeable feature on First Day (Sunday) is the vase of flowers that stands on the table in the centre of the room used for worship.
The Meeting House garden is, in practical terms, the burial ground and some gravestones can be seen. The earliest Quakers, however, were buried in unmarked graves and even when gravestones were permitted, all had to be plain and uniform. Modern practice, however, tends to favour cremation and the resting place of Friends' ashes is indicated by small, plain memorial plaques. There was for a brief time a tradition in Bewdley Meeting of planting trees in memory of deceased members of the Meeting.
The mainstays of the early Meeting were probably the Cotterell family, particularly as many families of Bewdley Quakers appear to have disappeared in the early eighteenth century. It is probable that most went to America to join William Penn's new colony of Pennsylvania (founded 1681). The Cotterells, however, were established as prosperous tradespeople and Jacob Cottrell’s son; Benjamin (1692-1778) became a warehouse owner, owning premises in Bristol as well as Bewdley. It was Benjamin Cotterell who built the handsome Queen Anne house at the beginning of Stourport Road, now a block of flats. It can easily be identified by the front drainpipe which is dated 1753 at the top.
His son, Benjamin Cotterell junior (born 1740) was a famous local character. Reputed to be "the best swimmer in England", this Benjamin Cotterell was a great practical joker as well as being a man of enormous strength. He would often take early morning rambles and go into neighbours’ houses for a gossip before breakfast. If no one were there he would eat the buttered toast left warming at the fire and leave a cinder in its place - presumably indicating that the toast had been left warming for too long!
The Cotterells also became increasingly wealthy and the rent roll of their Bewdley property was said to bring them £2000 a year. The prosperity of Friends belonging to the early Meeting enabled them to buy land to make a roadway to the Meeting House in 1781. There were, by then, several rights of way to the Meeting House, but these became the subject of dispute from time to time and one door into an adjoining property proved such a source of annoyance to the occupant that a Wesleyan minister put a bolt on the door in 1867 and informed Friends that this had been done to stop the ' children from the house straying into the Meeting House grounds’. It is likely, however, that the owner of the property was simply tired of Friends entering through his garden. This entrance has long since been bricked off.
