r fewer big towns in England in those days than there are
now. Probably at least two-thirds of the people lived in the country,
and only the remaining third were townsfolk: nowadays the proportions
are more than reversed. There was then no thickly populated 'Black
Country'; there were then no humming mills in the woollen districts of
Yorkshire, no iron and steel works soiling the pure rivers of Tees and
Wear and Tyne. Most of the chief towns and industries at that time
were in the South.

'London had a population of half a million. Bristol, the principal
seaport, had about thirty thousand; Norwich, with a similar number of
inhabitants, was still the largest manufacturing city. The publishers
of Truth would now make these three places their chief fields of
service, showing something of the same concentration of effort at
strategic centres which marked the extension of Christianity through
the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Paul.'[19]

A certain impetuous lad named James Parnell, already a noted Minister
though still in his teens, was hard at work in the counties of East
Anglia. In the next story we shall hear how Howgill and Burrough fared
in their mission 'to conquer London.'

Splendid tidings came from the two Johns, John Audland and John Camm,
of their progress in Bristol and the West: 'The mighty power of God is
that way; that is a precious city and a gallant people: their net is
like to break with fishes, they have caught so much there and all the
coast thereabout.' The memory of the enthusiasm of those early days
lingered long in the West, in the memory of those who had shared in
them. 'Ah! those great meetings in the Orchard at Bristol I may not
forget,' wrote John Audland many years later, 'I would so gladly have
spread my net over all and have gathered all, that I forgot myself,
never considering the inability of my body,--but it's well, my reward
is with me, and I am content to give up and be with the Lord, for that
my soul values above all things.'

Women also were among the first Publishers of Truth and helped to
spread the message. Even before Burrough and Howgill reached London,
two women had been there, gently scattering the new seed. It is
recorded that one of them, named Isabella Buttery, 'sometimes spoke a
few words in this small meeting.'

Two Quaker girls from Kendal, Elizabeth Leavens and 'little Elizabeth
Fletcher,' were the first to preach in Oxford, and a terrible time
they had of it.