Rowland Taylor

Life and Ministry

Rowland Taylor was rector of the cloth-trade market town of Hadleigh in Suffolk from AD 1544, and one of the most celebrated parish ministers of the Edwardian reformation. A doctor of both civil and canon law, he had been a chaplain in the household of Cranmer at Lambeth and was Cranmer's domestic theologian. Hadleigh under his ministry was one of the most thoroughly Protestant towns in England, its parishioners catechized in the new English liturgy, its poor relieved from a fund Taylor administered himself, and its market regulated by ordinances Taylor had a hand in drafting.

Circumstances of Death

In the spring of AD 1554 a delegation of recusant Catholics in Hadleigh hired a London priest named John Averth to celebrate the Latin Mass at Hadleigh church. Taylor walked into the service and ordered Averth out of the chancel; the Catholics defended the priest, and a brawl ensued in which Taylor was outnumbered and ejected. Reported to the bishops and arrested, he was examined by Gardiner, Bonner, and Tunstall, deprived of his living, and condemned for heresy. Carried by guard back to his own town on 9 February AD 1555, with his hands bound, he addressed the watching parishioners of Hadleigh from the cart, was burned at Aldham Common a mile out of town, and was reported by Foxe to have leaped from his horse with such gladness on arriving at the stake that the guards had to restrain him.

Legacy

Taylor's death made Hadleigh the most-cited Marian martyrdom in the English Reformed tradition outside of the great trio at Oxford. His parishioners erected a monument at the site of his burning that has stood, replaced and renewed, since AD 1819. His witness is that the country pastor is no less a confessor than the city bishop — that the same fire took the doctor of laws as took the apprentice, and the same Lord met them both. He went to the stake on his own ground, before the eyes of the congregation he had taught, and gave them their last sermon on the road from the cart.