They may now be associated with peace, but when they first appeared they were considered dangerous radicals. Quaker Glen Reynolds looks at the origin of his movement.

THREE hundred and fifty years ago, if you looked out of your window you may well have witnessed a mood of great change, a tension in the air reminiscent of an army about to enter a village or town previously held under occupation. That army, albeit of pacifists, would have been a contingent of Quakers (or "Friends").

People in the 1650s ran indoors and locked their houses because of the turmoil which could be whipped up by these religious revolutionaries and freedom fighters. Quakers in Britain and Ireland are commemorating this 350th anniversary in a number of staged events, local and national (the Quaker Meeting House in Darlington is offering tours and an historic photographic display during the Heritage Weekend in September), which mark a definitive point in time when the Quaker movement is said to have moulded itself into an identifiable religious group, in 1652.

It has been written that no greater moral change has ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the period of the Civil War. In the 1640s up to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England was governed by a newly-translated book, and that book was the Bible. The great problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the minds of Shakespeare's day, pressed for an answer not only from the noble and scholar, but also from farmer and shopkeeper.

A book published in Priestgate in Darlington, stated that: "Till the followers of Fox and Penn settled on Skerneside, Darlington was a humdrum country town."

Much the same could be said about most of the north of England in the 1650s. The North-East, in particular, is an area where God has moved powerfully over the years. The Christian gospel first came to the region in Roman times, and the North-East has played a significant role in many important Christian movements and missions.

In the winter of 1651, the spiritually restless George Fox (born in the Midlands in 1624) rode northwards from Derbyshire, and headed into Yorkshire.

William Penn states that Fox, in 1652, had a vision of the great work of the Lord whilst traveling in Yorkshire. "There his eye was directed northward, beholding a great people that should receive him and his message in those parts."

The Northern counties offered much to the young Fox: barren and backward, isolated and fought over by powerful Scottish lairds and English earls, the North boasted York Minster, and Durham was a formidable hunting ground for new seekers of faith.

George Fox's Yorkshire rolled flat to the east and windmills dotted the landscape, with the North Sea lapping its coastline. Parishes were large, bishops were absentees, clergymen were ignorant and ill paid, and schools were fewer than anywhere else in the country. Yorkshire did not, of course, stand alone with these drawbacks, but the North was still considered a backwater, ignored and looked down upon by the so-called more sophisticated southerners, a place where discontent and religious revolt every so often rose like lava from a volcano.

Prompted by economic discontent, bad harvest, cattle plagues, enclosures and too much money transferred south into the hands of absentee landlords favoured by the Crown - the region responded favourably to the preaching of untrained and itinerant evangelists such as Fox.

Crossing into Yorkshire, Fox encountered people of action. He referred to them as "tender" - a term meaning that the people in Yorkshire were willing to explore "any ordinance or worship until they had a certain evidence from the spirit of God that his spirit, life, power and presence were not in it".

In the north east of Yorkshire, in Staithes, he attacked the clergy and he travelled the North York Moors on to Whitby and Scarborough, over the Wolds to Malton and Pickering, going from Pickering to places where he sat on haystacks and spoke nothing for many hours amongst his followers, leaving them famished for his words.

Eventually Fox moved around the hills of western Yorkshire, adjoining Westmoreland and Lancashire, to a site some 1,830ft high and above the land surrounding him. This was the area that locals knew as a haven for witches, and to be avoided. Instead of running from it, Fox stayed to explore and climbed to the top of the hill with the mist clearing around him.

Looking westward towards the coast, he saw a people waiting to be gathered. This hill at Pendle was the end of the beginning for Fox and the beginning of Quakerism as we know it today.

Fox did not move westward to the places where he visualised the gathered people, but to the north and the rough and hilly areas beyond the Pennines. The landscape was forbidding, bare and empty. A long tradition of localism had survived in these western dales, feeding notions that the people were free from outside control, church or state.

Fox and his followers searched for the dissenters amongst the moors and, in the late 1640s to early 1650s, the area was seething with dissenters who despised the Royalists for their tithes and the persecutions that communities endured.

Fox was staying near Sedbergh at this time, and on Sunday, June 13, 1652, word had reached him that there was to be a large dissenters meeting at Firbank Fell, on a hill, on the Westmoreland side of the River Lune.

Once there, Fox was aware of the significance of such a large gathering of potential supporters. He attacked the established church, its hireling priests and the errors of the church since the days of the apostles. He preached that "Christ had come to teach his people himself" - even "common" people such as those there gathered could recapture "the spirit and power that the apostles were in".

It was, in essence, a totally radical message of liberation and freedom from the chains of the establishment, including its agent, the established Church. Men and women were able to receive and proclaim the Word of God without the mediation of the priesthood.

It was soon after this that the cities of York, Newcastle and Durham became key centres of revolutionary Quaker activity. In the 1650s, Quakers started to meet in and around Darlington in private houses and barns, for fear of being found worshipping and plotting against the hierarchy of the Church.

Fox's itinerary Journal identifies Quakers in Darlington and Newcastle who had their goods and livestock taken from them by way of fines. Many were imprisoned, tortured and died for their libertarian beliefs. Quakers met in Cotherstone and in the farmland close to what is now Grange Road and Victoria Road in Darlington, until, in 1678, purchasing the land in Skinnergate for burial purposes, for £35. This is the current site of the Quaker Meeting House.

Shortly after 1652, the Quakers of Durham and Darlington were referred to as the "Brethren of the North" and in one notable pamphlet they encapsulate why Quakers are proud to commemorate the beginnings of our movement as a welcoming and liberating voice for the spiritually hungry.

For every Quaker it was said: "Everyone to bear his burden, the strong with the weak that the weak be not oppressed above his strength, but all drawing on, hand in hand, that the weak and the tired may be refreshed and so all become a joint witness to the everlasting truth."