What is the origin of the name Quakers?
According to William Oats, an Australian Quaker historian who wroteA Question of Survival, Quakers in Australia in the 19th Century, (UQP 1985) the original name by which the followers of George Fox were known as early as 1652 was ‘Friends in the Truth’. They did not look upon themselves as a separate sect. The term ‘Quaker’ was a nickname, coined as the result of a courtroom rejoinder by Fox to the judge, Gervase Bennett, who was examining him on a charge of blasphemy. Fox said that Justice Bennett ‘first called us Quakers because we bid them tremble at the word of God, and this was in the year 1650’./p> The term ‘Society of Friends’ began to be used towards the end of the eighteenth century. Until the end of the eighteenth century the term ‘People called Quakers’ was in general use. The full descriptive term used now is ‘The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)’. ‘Quaker’ tends to be the more popular usage, the more distinctive, whereas ‘The Society of Friends’ carries an instituti
