SAWREY, John (d.1666), of Plumpton, Ulverston, Lancs.

Sawrey belonged to a junior branch of a family that had settled in the Furness region of northern Lancashire by the reign of Henry VIII.18T. West, The Antiquities of Furness (1774), 285; R.S. Boumphrey, C.R. Hudleston, J. Hughes, Armorial for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Cumb. and Westmld. Antiquarian and Arch. Soc. extra ser. xxi), 265. Their main seat was at Plumpton, in the parish of Ulverston, which Sawrey’s great-grandfather had purchased from the crown in the mid-sixteenth century.19VCH Lancs. viii. 359. Sawrey’s father, Anthony, died while he was still a minor, and his upbringing was entrusted to his mother. Anthony Sawrey seems to have been a man of trenchantly Protestant convictions, leaving £10 in his will for the support of a preaching ministry at Ulverston. Reference also to his ‘husbandry gear’, and the meagre bequests he made, do not suggest that he was among the wealthiest of Lancashire gentry.20Lancs. RO, RCHY/2/3/70; DF/1279; West, Antiquities of Furness, 285-6. His most illustrious connection was one of the men he appointed supervisor of his will, his brother-in-law the future Lancashire royalist William Farington* of Worden. Farington was subsequently involved in administering Anthony Sawrey’s estate on behalf of his children.21Lancs. RO, DF/1279.

Sawrey played no known part in the first civil war, although it is likely that he sided with Parliament, for in October 1646 he was appointed an elder for the ninth Lancashire Presbyterian classis.22LJ viii. 512. However, he held no significant office in local government until his promotion in 1649 to the Lancashire commission of the peace.23Lancs. RO, QSC/51. Thereafter, he emerged as an active and dedicated member of the county’s ruling elite and was among those militia commissioners who helped organise the county’s forces against the invading Scots in 1651.24Add. 59661, f. 25; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 39. The compounding commissioners appointed him one of three sequestrators for Lancashire in the summer of 1652 – an office he held until at least March 1653.25CCC 603, 629; Lancs. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Stanning, 185.

In the summer of 1653, Sawrey, his fellow sequestrations commissioner Robert Cunliffe, and William West were selected by the council of officers to represent Lancashire in the Nominated Parliament. What precisely recommended Sawrey to the council, beyond his godly credentials and career as a servant of the commonwealth, is not clear. He was appointed to the committees for Scottish affairs set up on 9 and 20 July 1653 and was added on 5 September to the committee for public debts.26CJ vii. 283b, 286b, 314a. His inclusion by an anonymous pamphleteer among those MPs who were thought to be inimical to a learned and publicly-maintained ministry is almost certainly inaccurate.27Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 426. In the early 1650s, for example, Sawrey had been an extremely active member of the Lancashire commission for the maintenance of the ministry; and in August 1654, he was appointed one of the ejectors for the county.28Lancs. and Cheshire Church Surveys ed. Fishwick, i. 1, 118, 124, 125, 132, 133, 143, 144, 149, 152, 157, 158, 170; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 305. He was also a resolute opponent of the early Quakers, who described him as ‘the greatest persecutor in the north of England’.29Jnl. of George Fox, i. 48, 51, 57-8, 77, 220, 408.

Sawrey retained his place on the Lancashire bench during the protectorate – although he attended no quarter sessions after 1654 – and worked closely with Major-general Charles Worsley* and William West on the county’s commission for securing the peace of the commonwealth.30HEHL, EL8179, 8184, 8186; TSP iv. 733; v. 242; B. G. Blackwood, ‘The Lancashire Gentry, 1625-60: a Social and Economic Study’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973), 199. Predictably, Sawrey was removed from all offices in the months following the Restoration.31Lancs. RO, QSC/51; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 383.

Sawrey was drowned ‘in a puddle’ at or near Skipton while riding home to Lancashire from York early in 1666 (and not while crossing the treacherous Leven Sands, near Ulverston, as one authority has stated).32Jnl. of George Fox, i. 383, 408; Lancs. RO, WRW/F, will of John Sawrey of Plumpton 1666 (inventory); VCH Lancs. viii. 359. He was buried at Plumpton on 30 January.33Ulverston Par. Regs. ed. Bardsley, Ayre, 156. In his will, he bequeathed his ‘wheels, carts … ploughs, harrows with all the iron teeth, yokes, teams, gavelocks [crowbars], hacks, spade, with all other my husbandry gear’ to his son and heir Anthony. He appointed his brother Roger Sawry*, a Baptist and former Cromwellian soldier, one of the supervisors of his will. His personal estate, including the £182 he was owed by his creditors, was apparently worth not much more than his own debts of £221.34Lancs. RO, WRW/F, will of John Sawrey of Plumpton 1666; VCH Lancs. viii. 403. None of Sawrey’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.