ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1677 the Quaker matron Margaret Treadway paid a visit to Elizabeth Crouch at the Quaker girl’s home in the Buckinghamshire parish of Prestwood. She was there to warn Elizabeth of the impropriety of her continued residence at her widowed father’s house. According to the men delegates to the Upperside monthly meeting of south Buckinghamshire, ‘Elizabeth stood charged by some of her Neighbours of the World with having behaved herself very immodestly with her father’. Judging the matter ‘more proper and comely for women to examine than for men’, they had referred it to the newly formed Upperside women’s business meeting attended by fifty-three Quaker matrons from south Buckinghamshire and the neighbouring villages of Hertfordshire. Margaret Treadway was one of the three women entrusted to investigate the charges against the miscreant girl who, she reported, was ‘hard and insensitive to the truth’. Her evaluation was vindicated when, at the winter’s end, Elizabeth Crouch committed a second offence of being married by a priest.1
