Ann Blaykling (abt. 1630 - aft. 1708)

Born about 1630 in Draw-well, Sedbergh, Yorkshire, England

Died after 1708 after about age 78 in Sedbergh, Yorkshire, England

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Biography

Ann was a Friend (Quaker)

Ann Blaykling, most likely born at Draw-well, near Sedbergh, Yorkshire, England, the daughter of Thomas Blaykling and an unknown mother. Her father shared a substantial home with his son John (1625-1705) and her brother Richard was a puritan minister. It is said little more is known about the family prior to the 1650s.^[1] There is inadequate information from which to make anything more than an educated guess as to her year of birth which might be say 1630.

George Fox visited Sedbergh in May 1652 staying at the Blaykling home. Both John and Ann became 'convinced' of Fox's message during his visit to Sedbergh and both became numbered among the early Quaker ministers and exponents known as the Valiant Sixty. Like many of the early Quakers, her activities often resulted in conflict with civic and church leaders or imprisonment. In 1654 she and Dorothy Benson were imprisoned a short time at York. Later that year she traveled to Cambridge where she was imprisoned for six months for vagrancy.^[1][2] In April 1655, she had an audience with Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, while in London.^[3][2] In June 1655 in Norfolk she was arrested for 'disturbances to the public peace.^[1]

She was one of the first to bring 'ye Message of glad tidings' to Falmouth in Cornwall.^[4] She was imprisoned at Falmouth where her ministry to a number of soldiers at Pendennis Castle resulted in their becoming Quaker.^[1] Later the same year she returned to Suffolk and was arrested at Haverhill. According to the warrant issued by Sir Thomas Barnardiston committing her to the gaol in Bury St Edmunds, Blaykling had abused the parish priest, calling him 'hireling and deceiver, greedy dumb dog with many more words of the same nature.' ^[1][5]

In 1657 while in Bedfordshire she entered public debate with the Baptist preacher John Bunyan. According to his scandalized account in A Vindication of … Some Gospel Truths Opened,^[6] she accused him of using 'conjuration and witchcraft', and advised him to 'throw away the Scriptures'.^[7]

Also in 1657, as written in George Fox's Journal, "Anne Blayklinge shee runn out & gathered a Company to worke on first days [Sundays] & not to pay taxes. but they must pay ye Improipriators tyths but they came in againe & ye rest yet did not came to nought."^[3] Of her defection the First Publisher's of Truth's notation reads in part, "For want of watchfulness ye enemie prevailed to lead her into singulerety & whimsie by wch she run out of unity wth ffriends for several years."^[4]

The account in First Publisher's of Truth goes on to read that after some years Ann came back to the fold, was part of the meeting at Sedbergh and there married. No record of that marriage or the name of her husband has ever been found. The last mention of her is dated 1708. Her date and place of death remain unknown.

W. R. Owens in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography astutely observes, "...her brief career provides a vivid illustration of the impact made by the socially iconoclastic Quakers in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Itinerant women Quakers were regarded with particular horror by the authorities; indeed the wife of a Cornish justice was so appalled at what she regarded as Blaykling's impudency that she declared her to be 'no woman but a man' (Reay, 58)."

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4} Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Owens, W R, 2004
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} Braithwaite, W. C., The Beginnings of Quakerism, London, Macmillian, 1912, p p 91, 345, 346
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} The Journal of George Fox, Ed. Penney, University Press, 1911, [1] II:461
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1} N. Penney, ed., ‘The first publishers of truth’: being early records, now first printed, of the introduction of Quakerism into the counties of England and Wales (1907) pp 25, 27, 251, 252
5. ↑ Besse, Joseph, Sufferings of the People called Quaker, London, 1753 p 662
6. ↑ Bunyan, John, A Vindication of Gospel Truths, 1657
7. ↑ Bunyan, John, Miscellaneous Works, I:185

See also:

• Ann Blaykling on Wikipedia
• Wikidata: Item Q18526478, en:Wikipedia