Kendal: Cumbria Record Office MS WDFC/FI/12: Minute book of Kendal Monthly and Quarterly Meetings
© Reproduced by kind permission of the Society of Friends, Kendal and Sedbergh Meeting

Miles Halhead (c.1614-1675) lived at Mountjoy. He first comes to our attention in 1647, when on Tuesday 10 August with a gang of like-minded Royalist friends 'to the Number of Four Hundred or thereabouts ... armed with Muskets, Swords, Pikes, Hand Guns, and other Instruments of War, to the great Terror and Affrightment of all peaceable and well-affected Persons thereabouts ... did, in a most violent and furious Manner, march together to the Town of Kendall’, imprison the Mayor and the Parliamentary Committee then in session ‘and, in most shameful and disgraceful Manner, hawled and pulled them down, and by Force carried them to the House of one Peter Sheppard in the said Town, a known Malignant, where they imprisoned the said Committee, and set Guards upon them, till Thursday Afternoon then next following’; they also seized the town's arsenal, and ‘apprehended and imprisoned Mr. Henry Massey’ the Vicar, who attempted to remonstrate with them. ‘And it being demanded of them, by the said Committee, "By what Authority they did do such Things?" They answered, “Their Swords were their Commissions”. They were reported to the House of Lords by the local magistrates — who included Gervase Benson. Halhead was arrested and his estate was forfeit as a Delinquent to the Committe for Sequestration. He recovered it on payment of £10.10s.

The First Publishers of Truth (page 264) on Underbarrow, says of Halhead:

Miles Hollhead, of Mountjoy, in Underbarrow, Husbandman, was allso then raised up in a liveing Ministrey, and travelled in ye worke thereof, in many parts of this Nation, & in the west of England suffered Imprisonment wth his Companion, Tho: Salthouse, and stood ffaithfull therein. His testemony was plaine and powrfull being a plaine, simple man. He died in peace wth the Lord, at his owne house, the __ day of the __month [1675], and was bueryed in ffriends Buerying place, in Kendall, Aged about [61].

He himself wrote a detailed spiritual autobiography, A BOOK Of some of the SUFFERINGS AND PASSAGES OF Myles Halhead OF MOUNT-JOY in UNDERBARROW in the County of Westmorland. As also, Concerning his Labour and Travel in the Work of the Lord: And how the LORD supported him, and delivered him by his mighty POWER out of the Hands of his Enemies. (London: A. Sowle, 1690). He gives a vivid account of his compulsions. [MORE] His wife Ann complained, ‘I would to God I had Married a Drunkard, I might have found him in the Alehouse; but I cannot tell where to find my Husband’. She was forcibly reconciled to his behaviour when the Lord punished her by the death of their five-year-old son Myles; he has her saying, ‘Then a great fear ceased [seized]upon me, and I said within my self, O Lord my God! give me Power to be content to give up my Husband freely to do thy will, lest O Lord, thou take away from me all my Children’.

Sources
William C. Braithwaite The Beginnings of Quakerism 2nd edition revised by Henry J. Cadbury (Cambridge University Press, 1961)
George Fox The Journal of George Fox edited Norman Penney, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1911)
Records relating to the Barony of Kendale edited William Farrer & John F. Curwen, 3 vols (Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society Record Series 4-6, 1923-1926)
‘The First Publishers of Truth’: being early records, now first printed, of the introduction of Quakerism into the counties of England and Wales, edited Norman Penney (Friends Historical Society Journal Supplements 1-5; London: Headley; New York: Taber, 1907)
Donald Rooksby The Quakers in North-West England, Part One: The Man in Leather Breeches (Colwyn Bay: D. A. Rooksby, 1994)

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