Toward the end of his life he wrote a letter for general circulation pointing out that Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and David were all keepers of sheep or cattle and so a learned education should not be seen as a necessary qualification for ministry.

[9] George Fox knew people who were "professors" (followers of the standard Church of England), but by the age of 19 he was looking down on their behaviour, in particular their consumption of alcohol.

[14] He hoped to find among the "English Dissenters" a spiritual understanding absent from the established church, but he fell out with one group, for example, because he maintained that women had souls:[15] as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition.

Fox seems initially to have had no desire to found a sect, but only to proclaim what he saw as the pure and genuine principles of Christianity in their original simplicity, though he afterward showed great prowess as a religious organiser in the structure he gave to the new society.

There were a great many rival Christian denominations holding very diverse opinions in that period; the atmosphere of dispute and confusion gave Fox an opportunity to put forward his own beliefs through his personal sermons.

[5] He was scathing about immorality, deceit and the exacting of tithes and urged his listeners to lead lives without sin,[22] avoiding the Ranter's antinomian view that a believer becomes automatically sinless.

Refusal to take oaths meant that Quakers could be prosecuted under laws compelling subjects to pledge allegiance and made testifying in court problematic.

In 1652, Fox preached for several hours under a walnut tree at Balby, where his disciple Thomas Aldham was instrumental in setting up the first meeting in the Doncaster area.

Parliamentarians grew suspicious of monarchist plots and fearful that the group travelling with Fox aimed to overthrow the government: by this time his meetings were regularly attracting crowds of over a thousand.

[39] Although not used until the 20th century, the phrase is related to the ideas of plain speech and simplicity which Fox practised, but motivated by the more worldly goal of eradicating war, injustice and oppression.

Instead, they ordered that he be pilloried and whipped through both London and Bristol, branded on his forehead with the letter B (for blasphemer), bored through the tongue with a red-hot iron and imprisoned in solitary confinement with hard labour.

In his preaching, he often emphasised the Quaker rejection of baptism by water; this was a useful way of highlighting how the focus of Friends on inward transformation differed from what he saw as the superstition of outward ritual.

[46] Fox commissioned two Friends to travel around the country collecting the testimonies of imprisoned Quakers, as evidence of their persecution; this led to the establishment in 1675 of Meeting for Sufferings, which has continued to the present day.

Disagreements, persecution and increasing social turmoil, however, led Fox to suffer from severe depression, which left him deeply troubled at Reading, Berkshire, for ten weeks in 1658 or 1659.

[48] In 1659, he sent parliament his most politically radical pamphlet, Fifty nine Particulars laid down for the Regulating things, but the year was so chaotic that it never considered these; the document was not reprinted until the 21st century.

He was imprisoned in Lancaster for five months, during which he wrote to the king offering advice on governance: Charles should refrain from war and domestic religious persecution, and discourage oath-taking, plays, and maypole games.

[49] In the aftermath of this attempted coup, Fox and eleven other Quakers issued a broadside proclaiming what became known among Friends in the 20th century as the "peace testimony", committing themselves to oppose all outward wars and strife as contrary to the will of God.

Not all his followers accepted this commitment; Isaac Penington, for example, dissented for a time, arguing that the state had a duty to protect the innocent from evil, if necessary by using military force.

Fox counselled his followers to violate openly laws that attempted to suppress the movement, and many Friends, including women and children, were jailed over the next quarter-century.

Fox was unable to travel there immediately: he was imprisoned again in 1664 for his refusal to swear the oath of allegiance, and on his release in 1666 was preoccupied with organizational matters – he normalised the system of monthly and quarterly meetings throughout the country, and extended it to Ireland.

More recent Quaker commentators have noted points of contact between the denominations: both claim the actual presence of God in their meetings, and both allow the collective opinion of the church to augment Biblical teaching.

[citation needed] Fox married Margaret Fell of Swarthmoor Hall, a lady of high social position and one of his early converts, on 27 October 1669 at a meeting in Bristol.

Shortly after the marriage, Margaret was imprisoned in Lancaster;[52] George remained in the south-east of England, becoming so ill and depressed that for a time he lost his sight.

Fox resolved to visit the English settlements in North America and the West Indies, remaining there for two years, possibly to counter any remnants of Perrot's teaching there.

[54] From there, Fox sent an epistle to Friends spelling out the role of women's meetings in the Quaker marriage ceremony, a point of controversy when he returned home.

Recuperating at Swarthmoor, he began dictating what would be published after his death as his journal and devoted his time to his written output: letters, both public and private, as well as books and essays.

According to Rufus M. Jones, the Book of Miracles "makes it possible for us to follow George Fox as he went about his seventeenth-century world, not only preaching his fresh messages of life and power, but as a remarkable healer of disease with the undoubted reputation of miracle-worker."

These writings, in the words of Henry Cadbury, Professor of Divinity at Harvard University and a prominent Quaker, "contain a few fresh phrases of his own, [but] are generally characterized by an excess of scriptural language and today they seem dull and repetitious".

We are told that he was "plain and powerful in preaching, fervent in prayer", "a discerner of other men's spirits, and very much master of his own", skilful to "speak a word in due season to the conditions and capacities of most, especially to them that were weary, and wanted soul's rest"; "valiant in asserting the truth, bold in defending it, patient in suffering for it, immovable as a rock".

Perhaps his most significant achievement, other than his predominant influence in the early movement, was his leadership in overcoming the twin challenges of government prosecution after the Restoration and internal disputes that threatened its stability during the same period.