Samuel Fisher (c.1605–buried 5 September 1681) was an English Puritan clergyman and writer, who was committed to a Presbyterian polity. After serving as a rural rector in Shropshire during the period of Charles I's absolute monarchy, he worked in London and Shrewsbury during the English Civil War and under the Commonwealth and in Cheshire during the Protectorate. After the Great Ejection of 1662 he settled in Birmingham, where he worked as a nonconformist preacher. The precise course of his career is a matter of some controversy.
Identity
This article concerns a Presbyterian minister who served at Shrewsbury approximately between 1645 and 1650 and afterwards at Thornton-le-Moors in Cheshire, retiring to Birmingham after his ejection. There were several Puritan clergy named Samuel Fisher and their lives seem to have become confused in some of the sources. The namesake with whom he is most often confused was a contemporary Puritan minister of Lydd who became a Quaker. An article of considerable length is devoted to this man's life in Athenae Oxonienses,Athenae Oxonienses, pp. 701–3 a generally reliable early source. The important Victorian archivist and genealogist Joseph Foster incorporated the same birth and academic details in his Alumni Oxonienses, while also featuring other men called Samuel Fisher of the same period. From these, the Dictionary of National Biography article selected details, beginning with birth at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1617, as the basis for the subject of this article. In his much more recent article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Stephen Wright has proposed that the early life and academic records of the two ministers have been transposed, making Northampton the Presbyterian minister's birthplace. Barbara Coulton's recent Regime and Religion, a study of Shrewsbury through the Reformation and English Civil War, states that the Shrewsbury Samuel Fisher was not the one born at Stratford, suggesting that a new consensus has now emerged that allows a biographical thread to be traced. However, it is not universal: the ODNB article on the Quaker minister still gives him the same parentage and academic record as Wright proposes for the Presbyterian minister who forms the subject of this article.
Early life and education Stephen Wright identifies the Presbyterian Fisher as the son of John Fisher of Northampton, born late in 1605 or early in 1606, who matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford in 1623. The argument for this takes into account the matriculation record, which gives this individual's age as 18. This squares well with a date of birth, calculated from a published sermon and will, between 8 November 1605 and 10 March 1606. Assuming Wright's argument is correct, the remainder of Fisher's academic record, sees him graduating B.A. at Trinity in 1627 and M.A. in 1630 at New Inn Hall, an institution now subsumed into Balliol College, Oxford, but then independent and a hotbed of Puritanism.
Samuel Fisher's career in maps
+ Samuel Fisher's career in mapsLocationDatesNature of postIllustrationCaptionApproximate coordinatesUpton Magna1635–42Rectory in the gift of the Barker family of Haughmond AbbeySt Lucia's church, Upton Magna, mainly Norman with 19th century restoration.Withington1635–42A chapelry of Upton Magna.St John the Baptist, Withington: an entirely Victorian building on the site of the original chapel.St Alban, Wood Street1643–6London church in hands of sequestrators after previous incumbent joined royalists.Tower, all that is left of St Alban. Rebuilt by Wren, restored in the 19th century and destroyed in the Blitz, nothing remains of the building of Fisher's day.Mary's, Shrewsbury1646–50Former Royal Peculiar, a vicarage in gift of Shrewsbury corporation. Fisher was also appointed ministerial or teaching elder in the Shropshire First Classis or Classical Presbytery.Nave of St Mary's, which is largely medieval, although the exterior was greatly altered in the 18th and 19th centuries.Bride's, London1651, 1652–4A vicarage taken over by its own vestry after its vicar, James Palmer, went into voluntary sequestration in 1645.The church as shown in the mid-16th century Copperplate map of London.Mary's, Thornton1654–62Rectory in the gift of Sir George Booth.St. Mary's, Thornton-le-Moors, photographed from the churchyard.Birmingham1662–81(?)Nonconformist preacher, licensed as Presbyterian teacher under Royal Declaration of Indulgence, 1672.
Early career
The Clergy of the Church of England database (CCEd) has a record of Samuel Fisher's ordination as priest at Eccleshall by Thomas Morton, then Bishop of Lichfield, on 18 December 1630.CCEd Record ID: 69926 The five years, 1630–5, between Fisher's ordination and his appointment as rector at Upton Magna, are largely unaccounted for. Rigg's account in the Dictionary of National Biography implies that he worked at St Bride's Church in London before coming to Shropshire: this is almost certainly untrue, as he is known to have worked there in the 1650s.Godfrey, Rectors and vicars. Fisher's ordination by Thomas Morton seems to connect him from the outset of his career with the West Midlands and his preaching at Shrewsbury in 1633 shows that he was moderately known as a preacher in the region before his presentation to the rectory. However, it is not known how or where, or even if, he had an ecclesiastical living during this period.
Despite the mystery as to his activities in this period, Fisher did make a significant public impact on Friday 20 September 1633, when he preached a sermon in Shrewsbury. The previous week had seen a canonical visitation by Bishop Robert Wright, which had been used to enforce and to propagate High Church ideas and practices. It had provided support for Peter Studley, the very divisive curate or incumbent of St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury, who hosted the bishop as preacher in his church on 8 September, speaking on obedience to the king as a religious duty. The bishop dined with Studley, who concluded matters a week later by publicly reading out a list of injunctions on church fittings and decorations. Fisher's sermon was probably intended as a counter-blast to this Laudian triumphalism. He attacked the enforced conformity to Laudian norms, which he considered a threat to the "free passage of out blessed Gospel" and potentially a path to a restoration of popery.Coulton, pp. 86–7. He probably spoke in St Mary's Church, Shrewsbury, which was in the gift of the town's corporation and could provide a platform for a guest preacher: the Puritan incumbent at the time, who had probably secured the services of Fisher, was the James Betton. Another possibility is an invitation from the Puritan Julines Herring, appointed the town's public preacher at St Alkmund's Church in 1618Coulton, p. 75. but a parishioner of St Mary's.Coulton, p. 79.
Upton Magna
Richard Baxter remembered his old friend Fisher as being "some-time of Withington, then of Shrewsbury."Reliquae Baxterianae, p. 98. Wright locates him there around 1640 as a curate of Thomas Blake before a move to Upton Magna. Withington was at that time a chapelry of the parish of Upton Magna,Withington Parish Register, p. iv. not a separate parish, and is treated as such by CCEd. In the Middle Ages Upton Magna had been dominated by Haughmond Abbey, a great Augustinian house which stood within it and held considerable property in the parish.Gaydon and Pugh (eds.), Houses of Augustinian canons: Abbey of Haughmond However, in the 12th century Bishop Roger de Clinton had confirmed that it was Shrewsbury Abbey that then held the tithes and advowson of both the church at Upton and its chapels, specifying Withington as one of them.Eyton, p. 264. Some of Fisher's letters were sent from Withington at dates when he is known to have been rector of Upton Magna, but this shows no more than that he worked across the whole parish, although he may have resided at Withington.
After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Haughmond was granted to Edward Littleton, who sold it to Sir Rowland Hill,Hope and Brakspear, p. 284. the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London. Hill's heiress at Haughmond was his sister Elizabeth, who married John Barker.Visitation of Shropshire 1623, Barker of Wollerton, Coulshurst and Haughmond, p. 27. The resulting branch of the Barker family lived at Haughmond, using part of the monastic buildings. It seems that the Barkers acquired advowson of their local church, as a Mr Barker is named as his patron by Fisher in a letter.Portland manuscripts, Volume 3, p. 70. This was John's grandson, Walter Barker of Haughmond,Coulton, p. 165, note 43. High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1621Visitation of Shropshire 1623, Barker of Wollerton, Coulshurst and Haughmond, p. 28. and a Parliamentarian from the beginning of the Civil War.Coulton, p. 93. Entries in CCEd indicate that Fisher was appointed as Rector of Upton Magna on 21 July 1635. This was recorded both in William Laud's RegisterCCEd Record ID: 200740 and in the Liber cleri, recording Bishop Wright's visitation of 1639.CCEd Record ID: 134896 The death and burial at Withington of the previous rector, Lawrence Lee, are recorded in the register, on 1 May and 10 May 1635 respectively.Withington Parish Register, p. 17. Bishop Wright's 1639 visitation found Thomas Blake serving as curate of Tamworth, Staffordshire,CCEd Record ID: 120124 a post he had held since at least 1629, a year before Fisher's ordination.Palmer, p. 234. The word curate in this case was used to indicate a vicar, rector or other incumbent who had cure of souls, not an assistant minister, although it could be used equally well for either. The database gives no indication that Fisher ever worked as an assistant to Blake, or that Blake ever worked at Upton Magna, although such records can never be exhaustive. However, there is a record in the 1639 Liber cleri of an additional curate, Richard Drayton, in this case presumably an assistant to Fisher, at Upton Magna.CCEd Record ID: 119904
As Fisher was Barker's choice, it is likely that the two men had similar views from the outset, so it is not surprising to find Fisher taking up the Puritan cause during his incumbency at Upton Magna. He seems to have followed controversies in Shrewsbury, which was very close. In a preface to some sermons he published in the 1650s, Fisher denounced those who had endangered his liberty by traducing his doctrine. While this might have applied to several phases of his career, he added in the margin: "Mr Studley and some others." At the time of Fisher's appointment Studley had become mired in a controversy over his book, The Looking-glasse of Schisme in which he sought to explain a sensational murder at Clun as the result of the Puritan principles of the killer.Owen and Blakeway, Volume 2, pp. 214–5. The book was published in London in 1634 and reissued in an expanded edition in 1635.Coulton, p. 86. Under Thorough, the experiment in absolute monarchy then in force, a reasoned reply by Richard More, a layman of St Chad's parish, could not be published and it did not appear until 1641. After the furore, Studley resigned from St Chad's and moved a few miles to a living at Pontesbury. Whether his offence to Fisher was more personal than the contents of his polemic is unknown. Certainly Fisher was not one to ignore intemperate abuse of his faith. He wrote to Sir Robert Harley, then serving as MP for Herefordshire in the Long Parliament, to report some anti-Puritan banter that might have serious implications.