HERRING, John (d. 1657), of Holmer, Herefs.

John Herring was from a parish gentry family, with a name common in Herefordshire. His branch of the Herring family lived at Holmer, a little to the north of Hereford, but he must have been related to the Herrings of nearby Burghill. Roger Herring, who held the advowson of that parish by 1623, found his privileged position vis-à-vis the church no barrier to his being cited in 1637 for not taking communion at Easter.12Duncumb, Collections, vii. 57; Herefs. RO, HD4/1/185. The Herrings of Holmer were from at least the 1570s tenants of the prebend of Huntington, a manor in Holmer that belonged to the dean and chapter of Hereford cathedral. The family seems to have been afflicted with a propensity not to produce male heirs, and John Herring inherited the customary tenancies of 25 acres or so from his brother. The Herrings served as ‘homagers’ at the views of frankpledge, and were in every respect typical yeomen farmers.13Hereford Cath. Lib. D792, D793. John Herring seems to have been prosperous enough before 1640 to buy property in Stretton-juxta-Sugwas, and may have already begun to accumulate the houses and messuages in Hereford which he held when he died.14Herefs. RO, AW28/32/56. He may have been of the Herefordshire godly party before the civil war. If so, he was most probably known to Sir Robert Harley*, and could therefore credibly offer a testimonial to Thomas Pierson, the minister of Brampton Bryan, as to the godliness of a man who sought a place in the Harley household as an ostler.15Add. 70107, misc. 71. Certainly, Herring was a Ship Money objector by September 1640, refusing either to collect the tax or to pay his own contribution. The description of him by the exasperated sheriff indicates that he was by then considered a man of estate, with access to legal advice on his rights.16CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 24.

By March 1643, Herring was in arms as a captain on the side of Parliament.17CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 11. From late July 1645, he served as a captain at the Canon Frome garrison for Parliament, so probably saw action there at the end of October, when troops from Gloucester garrison were sent to repel a threatening eastwards royalist advance from Hereford.18SP28/229, acct. of John Herring, 21 Dec. 1646; Webb, Memorials, ii. 241. Herring was in September posted to Gloucester, but his military service was probably entirely undertaken in the county regiment, suggesting why in 1645 he was appointed a joint-treasurer of taxes raised locally. He became in effect a reliable servant of the county committee, and among his earliest tasks was to provide finance for the Canon Frome garrison.19Add. 70136, accts. of Sept.1645; Add. 70005, f. 61 (2nd foliation). Early in 1646 he was recommended for elevation to the committee itself by one of its members, but nothing came of the suggestion, and it was not until March 1648 that Herring’s name began to appear on lists of the parliamentary commissioners for the assessment and the militia.20Bodl. Tanner 60, f. 588. Compared with stalwarts of the committee such as John Flackett*, Herring played minor but significant roles, such as the journey he undertook to London on its members’ behalf in September 1647.21SP28/229, Herefs. cttee. orders.

It was not until after the second civil war and the execution of the king that Herring moved to a position of greater potential influence in the county, and then it was in association with Wroth Rogers, governor of Hereford. The religious tide was running in favour of millenarian and sectarian opinion. Herring was prominent enough to be included as a commissioner for the propagation of the gospel in Wales (Feb. 1650), whose most important moving spirit was Thomas Harrison I*. In December 1650, he was recommended by Rogers for a post as a sequestrator. Initially he demurred, on the grounds that he was unable to satisfy the requirement not to be a debtor to the state on appointment, but was assured that this applied to sequestration monies only.22CCC 366, 378, 384. By March 1651, he was himself recommending godly men for appointments to county office, perhaps as militia officers. With John James* and John Pateshall*, he sought to co-opt the energies of a group of soldiers and committeemen included Rogers, the radical committee treasurer from Leominster, Miles Hill, and Stephen Winthrop*, then an officer of Harrison’s regiment, stationed in the Marches.23Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 114; Add. 70106, f. 162; G.E. Aylmer, ‘Who was ruling in Herefordshire from 1645 to 1661’, Trans. Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, xi. 386 n.41. In January 1652, Herring was paid by the civilian militia commissioners of the county, perhaps in connection with work done to safeguard Herefordshire against the emergency of the summer of 1651 when Charles Stuart and the Scots came as far south as Worcester. Certainly, he was one of those who after 1655 repaid money detained in local hands for that purpose.24SP28/229, warrant; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 279; 1656-7. p. 268; 1657-8, p. 186.

Herring would have had more in common with the Independent Wroth Rogers, governor of Hereford from May 1648, than with John Birch*, the Presbyterian who had previously held sway in the county. Rogers, Herring and Benjamin Mason* were members of an Independent church in Hereford that on 7 May 1653 congratulated Lord General Oliver Cromwell* on dissolving the Rump Parliament. They looked upon Cromwell as an ‘instrument to translate the nation from oppression to liberty, from the hands of corrupt persons to the Saints’.25Milton State Pprs. 92. Rogers and Herring were then selected to represent Herefordshire in the new assembly, a clear example of nomination by an Independent congregation, or a confederation of congregations. There has been some debate about the timing of Herring’s nomination. Edward Harley* wrote to his father on 11 June to tell him how Herefordshire men were to supply seats for Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, but he made no mention of who the nominees for his own county were to be.26Add. 70007, f. 22v. It is thought that Herring’s was a late nomination, because his name did not appear in the printed Catalogue of names, circulating on the London streets in mid-June.27Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 137-9. It is clear, in any case, that he was the junior colleague of Wroth Rogers. Herring’s radical religious outlook may not have played a significant part in his motivation to buy church lands. By July 1654 he was styling himself lord of the prebend of Huntington, having bought the manor, but as a sitting tenant, he probably invested from considerations of common prudence and opportunism.28Hereford Cath. Lib. D436.

Herring’s contribution to the Nominated Assembly was modest. On 19 July, a debate was resumed on whether to continue tithes as the basis of funding the national church. Thomas Harrison I and Thomas Blount unsuccessfully opposed a motion to refer the matter to committee, and the committee that was formed after their defeat by 56 to 49 votes included Herring.29CJ vii. 286a. The following day, he was named to the committee on prisons and prisoners, in the company of Rogers and his co-religionist and fellow Herefordshire man, John James.30CJ vii.287b. That was to be his last committee nomination for three months, and his reappearance in the committee lists was on the topic of wastes of timber in the Forest of Dean where his local knowledge and interests could be deployed, again alongside Rogers (21 Oct). His only other mention in the Journal was incidental. He was cited, again with Rogers, in a case of unfair sequestration in Worcestershire, the appeal brought into the House by Anthony Rous* The appellant had the sequestration imposed on him by the Herefordshire men lifted.31CJ vii. 337b, 338a. A contemporary cataloguer of Members of the assembly noted Herring, Rogers and John James as against working for a godly ministry, meaning that they were out of sympathy with attempts to rebuild the state church. It is noteworthy that these and other radical Members had been allocated lodgings together during the life of this Parliament, perhaps at their request.32Catalogue of the Names of the Members (1654, 669.f.19.3); CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412.

After the surrender by the majority in the Nominated Assembly of their power to Cromwell, Herring returned to Hereford. He seems to have entertained no further thoughts about a parliamentary career, but did not sign the petition of August 1654 against the election for the shire to the first protectorate Parliament of Richard Reed* and others considered crypto-royalists – a petition orchestrated by sectaries.33SP18/74/110. This is somewhat surprising because like Dennis Hollister* of Bristol, Herring came back from London probably more radical in religion than when he went. In January 1656 and probably earlier, the Quakers John Audland and John Camm visited Hereford, where they held at least two meetings in Herring’s house at Holmer. One of these meetings was ‘very large and peaceable without any interruption and many were convinced’.34First Publishers of Truth ed. N. Penney (1907), 114-15. The emissaries were pleased to note the attendance there for part of the time of the governor of Hereford, Wroth Rogers.35The Memory of the Righteous Revived (1689), 49. The amity between Herring and the Quakers was short-lived, however, and even in April 1655, Richard Farnworth told George Fox that Herring ‘and some others are clearly fallen, and turn enemies to the truth by words’.36Friends House Lib. Swarthmore MSS.3.25. The lord protector’s council felt sufficiently confident of Herring’s loyalty to name him as an assistant to Major-general James Berry* in September 1655. He had not been appointed an ejector under the new state church arrangements, probably a reflection on his sectarian sympathies, but retained his place on the bench of magistrates. Herring made his will, witnessed by Roger Bosworth*, in April 1657, wishing to be buried ‘without any ceremony either of superstitious dole, ringing of bells, preaching or anything else more than my friends conveying my body to and laying it in the grave’.37PROB11/263/683. He died shortly afterwards. John Beale, a Herefordshire correspondent of the polymath Samuel Hartlib, reported that Herring drank cider to alleviate ‘the stone’, from which he suffered, but ‘the cider wrought so violently upon the stone that it hastened the captain’s death’.38Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 52/144A. In 1671, Herring’s son, Eleazar, was a customary tenant of the manor which his father had briefly owned, but by 1683 he had surrendered his holding.39Hereford Cath. Lib. D793. There was probably a genealogical link between John Herring and the Captain Herbert Herring, an attorney and undersheriff of Herefordshire, who married a daughter of Sir Henry Lingen of The Mynde and flourished around 1700, but none of the Herring family served in any future Parliaments.40Hereford Cath. Lib. D436; Thomas, Earl Coningsby, Collns. concerning the Manor of Marden (1813), 404-5.