'What, five women live happily together! I will come and see
you.'

Dr Johnson to Sally More ( 1776)

THE five More sisters, Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, and Martha,
were pious, intelligent, and highly competent young women. ¹ Edu-
cated by their parents, they were sent out into the world unusual-
ly well prepared to earn their living. Little is known of their
parents. ² Mary Grace, their mother, daughter of 'a creditable
farmer' at Stoke, near Stapleton, Bristol, was a woman of vigorous
character. Jacob More, her husband, a man of gentle birth, was
born at Thorpe Hall, a 'substantial family mansion' at Harleston,
near Bungay, Norfolk, in 1700, and, becoming a good classical
scholar at Norwich Grammar School, then under Samuel Parr's
brother, intended to take Holy Orders. Differences of opinion in
religion and politics, for Jacob More was a Tory and High Church-
man, in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term, while his
mother was a zealous Nonconformist, and the unfortunate issue
of a lawsuit which 'blasted his hopes' of succeeding to a family
estate at Wenhaston, Suffolk, sent him from the East to the West
of England to seek a livelihood. There, through the patronage of
Norborne Berkeley, Esq., later Baron Bottetourt, the local mag-
nate at Stoke Park, he became master of a poorly endowed charity
school at Stapleton, ³ three miles outside Bristol, married Mary
Grace, taught his schoolboys and his five daughters, and invited
relays of unfortunate prisoners, whom the persistent French Wars
deposited in the neighbourhood, to polish his children's knowledge
of the French language. His daughters, well equipped, established

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