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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1998-11 > 0911788127


From: Nathaniel Taylor< >
Subject: TAYLOR: English origins
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 21:28:47 -0500


I wrote:

>To those who have posted lines purporting to show descent of Virginia
>Taylors (James Taylor, John Taylor of Lancaster Co., etc.) from either the
>protestant martyr Dr. Rowland Taylor, or from the Shadockhurst, Kent
>Taylors (and from the fictitious minstrel Taillefer), please be advised
>that ALL such lines are FALSE.
>
>Will post more later in the weekend, after the Harvard-Yale game.

I'd like to go on for a bit, as I threatened to yesterday, about these
alleged Taylor origins.

Ms. Bass said in one post that "The ancestry of James [Taylor, ancestor of
President Zachary] has 3 possible lines (sets of parents) - Rowland Taylor
is one." The second, she said, is "through Matthew Taylor"--essentially
the Shadockhurst line, which goes back, allegedly, to the minstrel
"Taillefer." While Ms. Bass didn't specify the third possibility (what is
it?), these two each need to be addressed separately, not least because
they've each been postulated for more than one American Taylor line.

I. "Taillefer" and Shadockhurst line

A descent of some modern Taylors from "Taillefer" (fictionalized Norman
minstrel/knight placed at the Battle of Hastings in the Norman poet Wace's
fictionalized epic _Roman de Rou_) appears in the 1838 edition of Burke's
_Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and
Ireland_ (4:237-241) detailing a Taylor family originally from
Shadockhurst, Kent, whose representative, Major Joseph Pringle Taylor of
Pennington, Hampshire, had received a grant of arms from the College of
Heralds in 1823, registering that descent to himself (see Thomas Woodcock
and John Martin Robinson, _The Oxford Guide to Heraldry_ [Oxford, 1988],
108).

The lineage deriving the Kentish Taylors (who are attested in late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century visitation pedigrees) from the
Norman 'Taillefer' and an intervening landholder named 'Talefer' certainly
predated Burke. One distant relative of mine noted that she copied this
Kentish Taylor lineage out of a manuscript in the British Museum by
Kentish antiquarian Edward Hasted (1732-1812). It is probably BL MS Add.
5520, a folio volume "of pedigrees of diverse families within the county
of Kent" (to quote the handwritten 19th-century MS catalogue) owned by
(and partially in the hand of) Mr. Hasted, in which is found "a pedigree
of Taylor of Shadoxhurst and Maidstone (including Hall) from one in the
possession of the late Rev. Joseph Milner of Preston Hall, Aylesford," at
f. 96. I was not able to see this MS when I was in London in July,
because it had been sent out for reproduction. I would not be surprised
if the "Taillefer" link to the Kent pedigree can be traced back through
Hasted's source, Rev. Joseph Milner (1744-1797). Any Londoner reading
this would do me a great favor by looking it up sometime!

Major Joseph Pringle Taylor was noted by Woodcock and Robinson as being
one of the few men to receive British grants of arms in the nineteenth
century which recognized descent through Americans. His paternal line
derived from Edward Taylor of Middletown, New Jersey, allegedly a member
of the Shadockhurst Taylor family. The Kent / "Taillefer" lineage, plus
the American descendants of the New Jersey family, are treated in Elisha
Taylor, _Genealogy of Judge John Taylor and his Descendants_ (Detroit,
1886) (as well as the book Cris Nash refers to, Christina Taylor Bass and
Frank Nelson Bass, _Genealogy Taylor-Snow_ [1935], which I haven't seen).
Despite the recognition of Major Joseph Pringle Taylor's pedigree by the
College of Arms in 1823, the link between the New Jersey Taylors and the
armigerous Kent family of the sixteenth-century Visitation pedigrees is,
Cris Nash reminds us, apparently false.

As for links of any of the Virginia Taylor families to the Shadockhurst
line, I can only say that no shred of evidence for it has ever come to my
attention. Ms. Bass' account of the Kent theory of the ancestry of James
Taylor shows "Matthew, the 2nd son [of John and Elizabeth (Chute) Taylor
of Shadockhurst], b abt 1555, and if Burke be correct the ancestor of the
family which settled in America." However there seems no room to infer
Virginians in Burke's account of this man and his family (op. cit.
4:239-40). Perhaps there is another 'Burke' which does support this
alleged Virginia connection?.

II. Dr. Rowland Taylor, Protestant Martyr

I first found the descent of many different Virginia Taylor families from
the Protestant Rowland Taylor, rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk (+1555) in
print in _From Log Cabins to the White House: a History of the Taylor
Family_ by Mary Taylor Brewer (Wooton, Kentucky, 1985). Brewer cites as
sources John Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ (a.k.a. Acts and Monuments, first
pub. in English 1563; for the best ed. of which the 8-vol. version, 4th
rev. ed. [1877] of the Religious Tract Society serves well: Taylor's
martyrdom is reprinted in full [with some notes], 6:676-703) and William
James Brown, _The Life of Rowland Taylor_ (London: Epworth Press, 1959:
Brown was Dr. Taylor's distant successor as rector of Hadleigh at that
time). I have examined both works and neither gives much useful
information on Taylor's family. Brown was interested in descendants of
Rowland Taylor, but knew little. He did speculate about the relationship
between Rowland and Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Bishop of Down, Conner and
Dromore, but doubted the veracity of the link and notes that documents
supporting it (including a pedigree) had been in the possession of
Jeremy's Irish descendants but had been burned in the early nineteenth
century.

And although Brown knew the statement of the botanist William Turner, Dean
of Wells (+1568) that Rowland Taylor had been born at Rothbury,
Northumberland, Brown was not aware of any specific parentage or baptismal
record for him; nor of the idea that Rowland's wife was a Tyndale; nor
does he provide any baptismal or marriage dates for Rowland's son Thomas
Taylor (the young son mentioned dramatically in Foxe's tale of his
execution) who allegedly, according to data posted here and also included
(without reference) in Brewer's book, had a family at Hadleigh (and
perhaps another family at Cambridge, resulting in the alleged descent to
Bishop Jeremy Taylor).

It looks, from what's been circulated, as if there has since been some
fruitful research into Rowland Taylor's origins and descendants using
parish registers at Rothbury and Hadleigh (even though I find it odd that
the rector of Hadleigh himself should not have made use of his own
registers if they contained information on Rowland's son Thomas and his
family). If so, who did this original research and where has this data
been published? I have not seen it in any form in which it can be
thoroughly assessed.

Whatever may become known about Rowland Taylor's ancestors and descendants
will no doubt be fascinating, but does it connect definitively to any of
the early Virginia Taylors? I will repeat that I've not seen a single
element of a compelling argument for any specific identity between a
Virginia Taylor and a specific English Taylor family. The data supplied
in recent posts suggests a breakdown in specificity of vital data
(baptisms, etc.) in the crucial generations linking immigrants with
specific English families. In the absence of such data, it is the
reponsibility of those who put forward such a hypothesis to faithfully
reproduce any argument for the identity that may be found: it is not the
responsibility of others to 'disprove' the filiations.

Addendum: on the assumption of interrelationship among various Virginia Taylors

I should just add a final note of concern about the book by Ms. Brewer,
from which some data seems to have made it into some of the recent posts
(for example Kenneth Harper Finton's post). It alleges that many
different Virginia Taylor lines can be traced to the John Taylor whose
estate was probated in 1654 in Lancaster County, Virginia (the Northern
Neck). There is no evidence to support the idea that all the individuals
Brewer lists (and Finton after her) are his children. The estate records
name as his heirs only the son Richard (who died, childless, before 22 May
1669) and the daughter Elizabeth Sallard. The temptation to clump the
various other Virginia Taylor families together with this one, or under
any other single-family umbrella, has to be avoided. The mortality rate
in the Chesepeake and Virginia colonies was so much higher than in New
England in these crucial decades that the likelihood that persons of the
same name in subsequent generations were related is relatively much
smaller than in New England. See on this subject Henry Gemmerey,
"Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630-1700:
Inferences from Colonial Populations," _Research in Economic History_ 5
(1980), 179-232; and also James P. Horn, "Moving on in the New World:
migration and out-migration in the seventeenth-century Chesepeake", in
_Migration and Society in Early Modern England_, ed. Peter Clark & David
Souden (London, 1987), 172-212.

Nat Taylor

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