Ruth Follows

Ruth Follows was born in 1718, the daughter of Richard and Ruth Alcock, and married George Follows at about the age of twenty-three. From Castle Donington in Leicestershire she was drawn into the ministry young and remained in it for sixty years — until, quite literally, she was too old to ride. She died on the third of the Fourth month, 1809, at the age of ninety-one.

Her first visit to Ireland, in 1761–62, nearly killed her. She was taken dangerously ill at Edenderry and again at Portarlington, far from home and among people she scarcely knew. She went back twenty years later. In between she passed through a close inward conflict at Devizes, London, and Norwich; crossed the Welsh mountains; worked the southern counties and the city; went down into Cornwall and Devon; visited Coalbrookdale; and travelled the northern counties and Scotland. Her companions on the road included Elizabeth Fletcher and, in later years, Martha Routh.

What makes her Memoirs unusual is not the itinerary — a good many eighteenth-century Friends travelled as far — but the letters. Away from home for months at a stretch, Ruth Follows wrote to her husband George and to her children from every stage of every journey, and those letters survive in quantity. Six years of her later life are documented in nothing else. Writing from an inn at Waterford or a Friend’s house at Coalbrookdale, she reports the state of the meetings, asks after the farm, worries about her sons, and now and then says plainly how tired she is.

This is a kind of document the eighteenth century produced very little of and preserved even less: the travelling ministry described from the inside, in transit, without the smoothing that comes of writing a retrospect in old age. It is not a polished account of a life’s work but the thing itself, sent off in haste with the horses waiting.

The Memoirs were printed in 1809, the year she died, and gather three kinds of material: a Monthly Meeting testimony concerning her, her own brief memoranda, and a great many of the letters. Her lifetime spans the British calendar reform of 1752, so her dating by numbered months shifts partway through — a small technical hazard for readers, and a reminder of how long a working life this was.