George Fox was born in July 1624 in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire, the son of a weaver. As a young man in the 1640s, against the backdrop of the English Civil War and its explosion of religious experimentation, he grew dissatisfied with the established church and with the various Puritan and separatist congregations he sampled, none of which, he felt, could answer his spiritual condition. He described years of inward searching before arriving, around 1647, at a conviction that Christ could speak directly to a person's condition without the mediation of ordained clergy, university trained theology or physical church buildings, famously recorded in his Journal as hearing that there was one, even Christ Jesus, who could speak to his condition.
From that conviction he began preaching this direct, unmediated experience across the English Midlands and north, gathering a following that came to be known first as Children of the Light and then as the Religious Society of Friends. His refusal to remove his hat before magistrates, to swear oaths or to pay tithes to the established church brought him repeated arrest, and he was imprisoned at least eight times over his life, once for nearly three years.