 On a Midsomer Day in 1772, a drably dressed 51-year-old man climbed the low rise of hills that fringed the western edge of Northamptonshire to look down on the town of Bambry in the valley below. He had already travelled far that month, but he had barely made a fifth of the distance that he would walk from June until September of that year. John Mormon was a Quaker from Mount Holly near Philadelphia in the province of New Jersey. He was not yet an American, that country did not exist yet. He departed from the colonies by ship from the port of Chester on the Delaware River at the beginning of May to attend Quaker yearly meeting in London. Having failed to make sufficient impact there, he decided to tour local Quaker meetings across England to spread the message he had travelled all his way to promote, that slavery must be ended. This was not abnormal. Quakers often travelled far and wide to carry news, to visit friends and to preach. John Mormon had arrived in London on the 8th of June, or as early Quakers said to avoid the use of pagan names, the 8th day, the 6th month. He left London a few days later, perhaps via Bunhill Fields, where he may have visited the grave of the founder of Quakerism, George Fox. For much of his life, Mormon wrote a journal, from where we learn many of the details of his life in the colonies and his journey through England in 1772. Though far more detail about Mormon's travels in England were gathered by Henry Cadbury in his 1966 study, John Mormon in England, based on the written accounts of many of the Quakers who had met John Mormon along the way. By the 15th of June, Mormon had attended the meeting in Hartford, then via Baldock he reached Northampton around the 25th or 26th of June. The road to the northwest of England continues from there via Rugby Coventry in Birmingham, so why did he take a left turn and go south? There are two possible reasons. Firstly, it's an easy route to follow. In 18th century England, this road was the equivalent of a modern trunk road. Bambry Lane, the road between Bambry and Northampton, is an ancient, quite probably prehistoric, trackway. It's sometimes called the Cotswold Ridgeway. Like its more famous counterpart on the south side of Oxfordshire, this route begins in the coastal fringes of Lincolnshire and the Wash, follows the valley of the River Neen to Northampton, then takes a line through Bambry along the northern edge of the Cotswolds to the Iron Age site at Crickley Hill. The second likely reason for woman's diversion was that Bambry was a notable centre for Quakerism. The town had a large Quaker presence since the beginnings of the Society of Friends in the 1650s. Crossing the medieval stone bridge on Bambry Lane, of which just two of the seven archers survived today, he arrived in Bambry knowing that he would be welcomed. It was barely a century since the centre of the town had been rebuilt after its destruction during the Civil War. In the high street he would have seen the house of Edward Viva's, one of the founders of the local Quaker meeting in 1655, much as it is seen today. What he would not have seen though were Bambry's crosses, which had been destroyed by the Puritans a century and a half before. Coming to Bambry Quaker Meeting House, he would have seen it much as it looks from the outside today. The wall, along the leaves enclosing it, and behind, the stone front of the then almost new 1751 meeting room facing horse fair. And as you stand in the old meeting room, these are the same walls which witnessed his ministry to the meeting in Bambry that day. We have no detailed account of what John Warman said in Bambry. What was noted in the minutes was that it was a precious meeting, though from what he had said before we can hazard a guess. Even by Quaker standards, John Warman can be considered truly radical, and in the colonists he had travelled around meetings and markets to oppose the evil's slavery just as the plantation system was beginning to dominate the economy there, as he wrote in his pamphlet of 1753. Man is born to labour, and the experience abundantly shows that it is for our good, but where the powerful lay the burden on the inferior without affording a Christian education and suitable opportunity of improving the mind and a treatment which we, in their case, should approve, this seems to contradict the designs of providence, and I doubt not, as sometimes the effect of a perverted mind, for while the life of one is made grievous by the rigor of another, it entails misery on both. John Warman's influence upon Quakers in the colonies, and his walk around England in 1772, no doubt played a role in stirring the debate over slavery, just as it was beginning to be taken seriously. Only a few days before John Warman arrived in Bambry, echoing Warman's message, the British courts had declared, The state of slavery is of such a nature that is incapable of being introduced on any reasons moral or political, but only by positive law. It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. The term positive law means that there must be a specific law which makes the enslavement of certain people, and not others, legal, and since no such law existed, slavery could not be permitted on the British mainland. It would still be another 62 years before slavery was formally ended in the British Empire, and only then after slave owners were paid £20 million in compensation, the equivalent of £17 billion today, a British government debt which was not paid off until 2017, meaning that most British adults today have each paid compensation to slave owners rather taxes. In an era of expanding trade in the pursuit of wealth, echoing many aspects of the ecological debate today, John Warman advocated a simple life. His clothes, which many remarked were plain or drab, were an outward sign of his rejection of what we would today call consumerism, as he wrote in 1763. Wealth desired for its own sake obstructs the increase of virtue, and large possessions in the hands of selfish men have a bad tendency for by their means too small a number of people are employed in useful things, and some of them are necessitated to labour too hard, which, having no real usefulness, serve only to please the vain mind. In a time when such practices were not even questioned, Warman was a vegetarian because he objected to the treatment of farmed livestock. Many of his other ideas on what constituted a truthful life would still be considered radical today, prefiguring what is now called voluntary simplicity. As John Warman said, my mind, through the power of truth, was in a good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness, and I was learning to be content with real conveniences, that were not costly, so that a way of life free from much entanglement appeared best for me, though the income might be small. At a time when European states were beginning to battle over the spoils of empires, John Warman felt the need to act beyond the traditional bounds of the Quaker peace testimony, advocating both conscientious objection, and a refusal to pay taxes which might fund conflict, both positions which, again, will not become a major focus of action by the peace movement for well over a century. As he wrote in 1755, I believe that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes, yet could not see that their example was sufficient for me to do so, while I believe that the spirit of truth required of me, as an individual, to suffer patiently the distress of goods rather than pay actively, to refuse the active payment of the tax which our society generally paid was exceedingly disagreeable, but to do such a thing contrary to my conscience appeared yet more dreadful. Even though he travelled far, towards the end of his life he began to refuse the use of a horse or take carriage, he objectured to the harsh treatment of animals in the pursuit of an ever-faster world, as he wrote in 1772 on his journey through England. Stagecoachers frequently go upwards of 100 miles in 24 hours, and I've heard friends say in several places that it is common for horses to be killed with hard driving, so great is the hurry in the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan. John Warman left Bambi on the 29th or 30th of June, following what was then Ogilby's Road, which bears little relation to the modern B Road today. On the 1st of July he attended the meeting house in Shipsall on Stour, the building that today houses the town's library. From there, Warman turned north once again, through Warwick and Coventry, arriving in Birmingham on the 17th of July. Following the Trent Valley, he arrived in Nottingham on the 26th, and then took a circuitous route via smaller Quaker meetings until he arrived in Sheffield on the 2nd of August. From Sheffield he would travel through the heart of what was still not the fully developed industrial Yorkshire, which William Wordsworth would rail against when he came this way only 30 or so years later. Following the Ribble and Loone valleys, he made his way to Quaker meetings at Settle on the 16th of August, then via Lancaster to Preston-Patrick on the 23rd of August. At this point he starts to become ill, and his pace slows. Via Grey rig, he crossed the Pennines into Wensleydale, to the lovely meeting house at Counterset, and then on to Leyburn by the 13th of September. Then crossing the valley of York to Firske, he arrived in York for the meeting there on the 22nd of September. A day or so later, Warman was taken ill. He had contracted smallpox, quite lightly from meetings some days before. He died on the 7th of October 1772, and was laid to rest in the Bishop Hill Quaker burial ground two days later. Some have called John Warman the quintessential Quaker. His words are still challenging for many today, and certainly that he chose to actively live those ideals in his daily life was unsettling to many then too. But that is probably John Warman's most important challenge to us today, to distinguish the language of the pure spirit which inwardly moves upon the heart. 250 years after John Warman travelled to give his ministry here, everyone is still welcome to attend Quaker meetings in Bambry at 10.30 on Sunday mornings.