Roger Brearley

Roger Brereley (Brearley, Brierley etc.) (1586–1637) was an English clergyman, known as the founder of the Grindletonian sect. His actual views are known from surviving sermons, perhaps reconstituted from notes; those held by the Grindletonians may well have differed considerably from those attributed to them by opponents in polemics. Brereley was in his own view a supporter of Calvinistic orthodoxy, not a sectary, and he censures Jacobus Arminius.

He was born on 4 August 1586, at Marland, then a hamlet in the parish of Rochdale, where Thomas Brereley, his father, and Roger, his grandfather, were farmers. He had three brothers and two sisters younger than himself. Brereley himself began life as a puritan. He took orders and became perpetual curate of Grindleton Chapel, in the parish of Mitton in Craven; Grindleton is about two miles north of Clitheroe. He held (in 1626) a close in Castleton, in the manor of Rochdale, which had belonged to his grandfather. His preaching was simple and spiritual, and his followers soon became distinguished as a group. Brereley himself, in his piece Of True Christian Liberty, writes:

Some fifty charges were exhibited against Brereley at York by direction of the high commission, in his first appearance in 1617. This trial was one of two such occasions and was followed by another in 1627, still held before Archbishop Tobias Matthew, who died in 1628. Matthew sustained Brereley in the exercise of his ministry, and he preached in York Cathedral. In 1631 Brereley was instituted to the living of Burnley, Lancashire. He died in June 1637, and was buried 13 June. He was married, and had a daughter Alice, living in 1636.

His literary remains are:

Brereley had a local following, attracting worshippers from the nearby Giggleswick parish of Christopher Shute, but became more widely known after the proceedings against him. In 1618 the diarist Nicholas Assheton records the burial of one John Swinglehurst as of a follower of 'Brierley'. Thomas Shephard knew of him in 1622.

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