♂John Lawrence

John Lawrence (born about 1500) was a preacher of South Elmham, in Suffolk, England, who is remembered as having preached in Queen Mary’s reign to Protestants who met in secret in the woods. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Susan Lawrance (died 1610).

Life

What is known of him comes from a family pedigree written down by the antiquary Thomas Tanner^W (1674–1735), later Bishop of St Asaph, which leaves his first name blank. It calls him “a famous preacher, a reverend grave minister”, who in Queen Mary’s day (1553–58) had preached to those who “met together in woods & secret places, as they could”. Under the Marian persecutions^W Protestant worship was forbidden and its preachers could be burned, which is why such meetings were held in hiding. The pedigree adds that he was “a gentleman of a great estate & exceeding liberality to the poor”, that in Queen Elizabeth’s time he preached at Fressingfield, and that he owned St James Park in South Elmham.

The genealogist Michael Johnson Wood, who rebuilt the family in 2013, gives the preacher’s first name as John. He takes a royal pardon of 13 November 1587, issued to “John Lawrence of Southelmham” for a transfer of land, to be his.

Family

No record names his wife. Wood’s estimates spread the births of his children over more than twenty-five years, and he suggests that John married twice. Wood counts seven children: John of Fressingfield, Alice, James, Margaret, Thomas, Susan and a younger daughter. Two of the daughters married into Dedham, in Essex: Alice married William Garrard, and Susan married Henry Sherman the younger at Moze in 1568. Margaret married Richard Elmye of South Elmham.

Notes

How the family is known

Tanner’s pedigree survives among his manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and was copied by the Suffolk historian Joseph James Muskett. Tanner gave the preacher five children, while Muskett at first gave him one son, John, who died in 1610 or 1611, and later nine children. Wood’s study of the earliest Shermans of Dedham (New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 167, 2013, pp. 38–43) joins that pedigree to the Moze and Dedham records, which neither Tanner nor Muskett knew. The birth years in it, “say 1500” for John, are Wood’s estimates. Wood places above him an unnamed Lawrence with a second son, James Lawrence of Dedham, yeoman, and calls the dates of that generation conjectures. S. Allyn Peck reached some of the same conclusions in The American Genealogist in 1946–48.

The tie to Susan rests on that reconstruction: no record seen names John Lawrence as her father. The one document that links her to the family is the will of William Garrard of Dedham, dated 16 February 1600/1, which names his “brothers-in-law Thomas Lawrence and Henry Sherman”.