ERO Presents: Feet Forward - Mary Farmer’s European Expedition 1725
Join speaker Julie Miller form this talk about Saffron Walden Quaker Mary Farmer.
Exactly three hundred years ago Saffron Walden Quaker Mary Farmer led a group of Essex women Quakers on a three-month journey of religious ministry from Essex to Friedrichstadt on the River Eider in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
They travelled by boat and on foot through Holland and the Low Countries visiting Quaker meetings as they went. As they travelled Mary Farmer wrote a journal recording all her adventures along the way.
Her journal tells us of how they met various people, were helped by supporters or suffered hardships such as sleeping in barns, enduring fierce storms and even got chased by pirates in the North Sea.
In her party were two women from Manningtree who were possibly one of the earliest recorded same sex partnerships in the Quaker community.
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