Alice Hayes (Quaker)
Quaker preacher and autobiographer (1657–1720)
Alice Hayes (1657 – 1720), also Alice Smith, was an English Quaker preacher and autobiographer.
Life
Hayes was born in Rickmansworth in 1657, and her parents are unknown. She was brought up in the church of England and indulged in behaviour, like singing, that she would later regret as a Quaker. After she became a Quaker in 1680 she was evangelical, in 1696 she attended a Church of England service, and she stopped the service by standing to question the priest. She married a farmer named Daniel Smith, who she converted to her faith. She described him as handsome and faithful, who was tender and loving. After he died she was jailed for over twelve weeks in St Albans jail for not paying the tithes which she objected to on religious grounds. She was the leader of the group, and their objection was that a section of the monies gathered by the Countess of Essex was to pay for the parish priest. In 1701, they stopped trying to jail her, but they gave her heavy fines. In 1707 the crops seized in lieu of money amounted to over 43 pounds.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alice Hayes (Quaker)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.