The Soldiers burst in on the meeting, swords drawn and pistols cocked. They hauled out those that they found inside and when challenged for their warrant, the officer swung his sword about, declaring, “Here is my Warrant!”

Today the building you are looking at is a place where you can express your personality, beliefs and non-conformity through the medium of body art, but this tattoo parlour is testament to another form of rebellion.

Here people met in the name of a religion begun in the turmoil of the English Civil War. Feared and persecuted by the government; it attempted to challenge authority and move away from the official Church to create new, independent, rebellious paths. This religion was The Society of Friends, or the Quakers.

The Quakers were started by George Fox during the Civil War. Fox was a deeply religious but troubled shoemaker who travelled the length and breadth of England, as well as abroad, looking for enlightenment and help with his problems. He began to preach. He began to gain followers. Up and down the county Quaker communities sprang up and in Wiltshire he found many who were dissatisfied with the Church of England.

In Goatacre, Lyneham, Chippenham and Calne meeting houses appeared and people began to refuse to attend church or pay tithes, including the ancestors of the famous Harris family. They declared that religion came from within a person and not through a priest. Rejected baptism by water and said the Church was filled with superstition and unnecessary ritual. This threat could not go unanswered and Quakers were punished and locked up and for a time even outlawed, prisoners of conscience in a turbulent war filled world. Fox was imprisoned 8 times.

In Calne on 16th May 1660 the soldiers came. They burst into the meeting hall and dragged out the Quakers inside, arresting them on charges of blasphemy, non-payment of tithes and threatened charges of sedition. But the Calne friends persisted. They bought land in front of you in 1672, building a new meeting house, behind which they created a burial ground. They met here for over 200 years, at what is now number nine Wood Street.

It was rebuilt as you see it in the Victorian period, downstairs became a butcher’s shop and by the 1920s meetings had ceased and the building was leased out. Today, it is a tattoo parlour, but hidden behind it is still the burial ground of the old Quakers of Calne and its history is based on an act of rebellion against the Church that once brought the Army to town.

• Quaker Meeting House: Paul Hill.
• Quaker Meeting House Audio: Paul Hill and Ruth Hill.
• Building and Blue Plaque Images: Tim Havenith