Roland Taylor, well I found this line in J.C. Ryle's five English reformers.

In fact, it's the first line of Chapter 3 devoted to Roland Taylor a martyr.

Ryle writes this, Roland Taylor, rector of Hadley and Suffolk, one of the

famous Protestant martyrs in Queen Mary's days, is a man about whom the church possesses singularly little information.

Well, when I saw that, I thought,

let's see what little information we can find out about this man, who is he and why does he matter.

Well, it turns out that Hadley was just a small rural town about 50 miles outside of London

and there, Taylor, laboredored and lived mostly in obscurity.

Also Taylor never wrote any books, not even published a single sermon during his

lifetime so we have no literary legacy behind, but the legacy of his martyrdom has been

left behind for us.

Roland Taylor is chronicled in Fox's Book of Martyrs.

In fact, Ryle points out that it is extremely probable that Fox

visited Taylor's Parish and that Fox would have even interviewed Taylor's parishioners.

Well, not only was Hadley a small rural town,

the town in which Taylor was born

was a very small rural town.

He was born at Rothbury and Northumberland. In 2000, the census

had a population of about 1700 there at Rothbury. So back in Taylor's Day, would have been far, far fewer. He went on to become a student at Cambridge. And two things to note, first while at Cambridge, he came under the influence of the the influence of Bishop Latimer.

Bishop Latimer himself would go on to be martyred.

And also in addition to those sermons, Roland Taylor had some sort of position under Thomas Kramer even lived in Thomas

Kramer's house. This of course was the days of Henry the 8th and on into the reign

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