Payment of tithes among Quakers, 1660‐1740

Quakers (or ‘Friends’ as they called themselves) were distinguished by their refusal to make tithe payments that supported the Established Church, a refusal which they extended to lay impropriators who had obtained the right to tithe payments in a parish. This refusal characterised the movement from its earliest days in the 1650s, with many Friends suffering distraints and imprisonment. Nevertheless, some Friends did pay tithes, a state of affairs which remains unexamined in the literature. This paper examines Quakers who paid their tithes, or who otherwise escaped suffering for non-payment, from the period of persecution beginning in 1660, through the 1689 Act of Toleration, to the mid-eighteenth century.