5 Quaker marriage records in Philadelphia showed a remarkable variety of urban occupations: merchants, 16; cordwainers, 8; tailors, 7; carpenters, 5; bricklayers, bakers and weavers, 4 each; coopers, joiners and shipwrights, 3 each; mariners, chandlers, turners, brickmakers, sawyers, wheelwrights, husbandmen and yeomen, 2 each; clothier, saddler, glassmaker, tanner, glover, winedresser, worsted-comber, combmaker, blacksmith, bodicemaker, vintner, locksmith, tobacco pipemaker, clerk, physician and gentlemen, 1 each. Quaker marriage records in London showed much the same patterns; Tolles found that three fifths were artisans and manual workers; the rest were mostly tradesmen and shopkeepers. See Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, 41.
6 Williams, “The Quakers of Merioneth,” 122-56, 312-39. Controversy exists on the social origins of Welsh Quaker emigrants. Charles H. Browning argued that they were “the highest social caste of the landed gentry in Wales.” J. Ambler Williams, on the other hand, thought that they tended to be “the most impecunious brethren.” Subsequent inquirers tended to take a middling position. Cf. Browning, Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania, 27; Williams, “The Influence of the Welsh in the Making of Pennsylvania,” 120; F. B. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York, 1960), 113; Dodd, Character of Early Welsh Emigration to the United States.
7 Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, 40; in another study, Richard Vann found that Quaker emigrants from Bristol were mostly textile workers (35.7%) and artisans, servants and laborers (42.9%); only one emigrant was identified as a gentleman and only two were merchants or tradesmen. Vann, “Quakerism: Made in America?,” 161.