BOSWORTH, Roger (1607-60), of Hereford.

The names Boswood and Bosworth seem to have been used interchangeably for this family, which haled from Woolhope in the generation before this MP’s. The apparent absence of Boswood or Bosworth wills from Woolhope may suggest, however, that this was a yeoman family not settled in Woolhope for long. There seem to have been more of the name Boswood in Bishop’s Frome than anywhere else in Herefordshire. Roger Bosworth’s attendance and success at Oxford University may owe something to patronage, as his father, a man of no eminence, had died in 1616, a decade before Roger matriculated at Brasenose.7Al. Ox.; Woolhope par. reg. Roger Bosworth must have been a man of parts, for by 1634 he was back in Woolhope, helping his friend, Bennet Pryor, compile his pedigree for the visiting herald of the College of Arms.8Vis. Herefs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. n.s. xv), 153. Around this time Bosworth married, and seven of his children were baptised in Woolhope, between 1637 and 1644.9Woolhope par. reg.

There is nothing to suggest that Bosworth took an active part in the civil wars, but by January 1643 he was in Oxford, receiving an honorary degree in medicine.10Al. Ox.; Fasti Oxon. ii. 49. In the light of his later career, it seems quite possible that he owed this recognition, perhaps for his work as a physician in his own district of Herefordshire, to John Scudamore†, Viscount Scudamore [I]. It would surely have needed a patron of Scudamore’s social standing and royalist credentials to ensure that a man of such modest family would be so honoured in wartime Oxford. By 1648, Bosworth was living in Hereford, in the Owens ward of the city, where his first wife was buried in August of the same year. The minister at Woolhope noted the burial in his own register, a clue as to the local importance ‘Dr Boswood’ had by this time assumed.11Woolhope par. reg. There seems no doubt that Bosworth was a practitioner of medicine, perhaps with some skill in pharmacy. Certainly by January 1659 he was being spoken of beyond his own region as one who might have hit on a cure for gout.12Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs., Royal Soc. mss, 1A.

Bosworth served as an assessment commissioner for Hereford in 1652, but on no other commissions until 1660. Local politics was evidently not his milieu. He was presented by the city view of frankpledge in 1655 for encroaching on the waste, and again in 1658 for not turning up for this local court.13Herefs. RO, transcripts of city docs. 22 (loose); 23.iv.iii. He was evidently active in a range of local intellectual activities other than medicine, and became celebrated as the most noted judge of an annual cider competition in his native county. This had developed since Charles I had been impressed with the fine redstreak cider he had been offered by the gentry on his visit to Hereford in 1645. Cider had formerly been ‘an unregarded windy drink fit only for clowns and day-labourers’, but since 1645 had been improved to the extent that it was now reckoned by Herefordshire chauvinists as superior to French wines. The competition was organised by the gentry, and ‘he that hopes for victory sends his sampler into Hereford to Dr Boswood etc. to be judges of the question as touching gust and wholesomeness.’14Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 52/138B. The improvements in cider-making and apple-growing were part of a minor renaissance of intellectual vigour among the Herefordshire gentry, and were relayed in detail by John Beale, author of a tract on the subject, to his correspondent, the polymath Samuel Hartlib. Sometimes the discoveries were more proper to the analytical chemist than to the gourmet, as when Bosworth one day accidentally dropped his knife into a cider jar. ‘The knife steel and iron and all of the blade and all that was within the haft was totally consumed, the ivory haft remaining whole and perfect’. Beale admitted to Hartlib that Bosworth’s own cider was not of the best.15Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 52/101B.

In 1658, Bosworth was admitted as a freeman to Hereford corporation, and this was probably prior to his election as MP for the city.16Herefs. RO, transcripts, 23 (mayor’s bk. 1). There seems no doubt by this time that he was a client of Scudamore’s and was returned to Parliament on the peer’s interest. He lodged with Scudamore in Petty France, where John Beale thought ‘my lord or his Dr Bosworth’ might dispense a drop of cider to visitors. By 22 March, however, Beale was reporting that Bosworth was ill in London, and the doctor made no recorded impression on the assembly he had gone up to join.17Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 51/105A, 51/100B. He must have made it back to Hereford, in order to be included in the commission of the peace and to be returned to the Convention of 1660. He again travelled to London, where he was named to two committees of the House. He was dead by November 1660, however, the place of his burial unknown. He had evidently married again, his widow, Mary, occupying a 10-hearthed house in the Owens ward of Hereford in 1665. The William Boswood who held property in Woolhope and Hereford in the 1660s seems more likely to have been Bosworth’s brother or even a cousin, rather than his son. John Beale would have had to admit that Bosworth was not an outstanding example of ‘the long lives of cider-drinkers’.18Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 52/101B. None of his name sat in Parliament again.