reason for living and dying a bachelor.’ Frewen of Brickwall published this pamphlet to vindicate the archbishop's memory from the misrepresentations of Francis (whom, by the bye, he strangely calls Richard) Drake in his ‘Eboracum, or History and Antiquities of York Cathedral and City.’ Mr. Thomas Frewen also published a small volume of the archbishop's Latin speeches at Oxford when president of Magdalen and vice-chancellor. This is also dated 1743, and both pamphlets are dedicated to Edward Butler, LL.D., president of Magdalen and M.P. for the university. The archbishop died wealthy, and bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to his youngest brother Stephen, an eminent trader in London. Stephen Frewen (1600–1679) conveyed twenty-seven thousand guineas of the archbishop's money in specie in his carriage to London after the prelate's funeral; but the money which he deposited with Sir Robert Vyner, the banker, was lent to Charles II, and lost by the closing of the exchequer. Stephen Frewen purchased Brickwall House, near Northiam, and other large estates in Sussex and other counties, and was ancestor of the present proprietor of Brickwall.
By his will the archbishop bequeathed to Magdalen College, ‘my mother, that gave me my breeding, five hundred pounds, to be employed as my gift to the honour of the college, in some public way approved of by my worthy friend Gilbert [Sheldon], at the present time Lord Bishop of London; as also I forgive unto it five hundred pounds lent it by me, pecuniis numeratis, in a time of necessity;’ to every bishop of the kingdom a ring with this inscription, ‘Neque melior sum quàm patres mei,’ no one to be under the value of 30s.; to the Bishop of Rochester (Warner) a ring once Bishop Jewel's; to every servant a year's wages, besides their due. Dr. Chamberlayne, in his ‘State of England,’ p. 190, assures us that Frewen's benefactions, besides abatements to tenants, amounted to 15,000l.
[Wood's Athenæ (Bliss), iv. 821–7; Bloxam's Registers of Magdalen College; Le Neve's Lives of the Archbishops; Burke's Landed Gentry; a privately printed memoir in ‘Hastings Past and Present, with notices of the most remarkable places in the neighbourhood,’ by Mary Matilda Howard, 1855.]
FREWEN, JOHN (1558–1628), puritan divine, descended from an old Worcestershire family, was born in 1558. He is stated to have been baptised on 1 July 1560. His grandfather, Roger Frewen, and his father, Richard Frewen, were both possessed of property in Hill Croome and Earls Croome in Worcestershire. He was ordained priest by Bullingham, bishop of Gloucester, 24 June 1582, and in November of the following year was presented by his father to the rectory of Northiam, Sussex. On his becoming resident at Northiam it is supposed that Frewen occupied a house known as ‘Carriers,’ situated about two hundred yards south of the present rectory-house, and then the property of his friend and neighbour, John White of Brickwall. His first publication is entitled ‘Certaine Fruitfull Instructions and necessary doctrines meete to edify in the feare of God: faithfully gathered together by Iohn Frewen,’ 18mo, London, 1587. Of this work, which is dedicated to ‘M. Tho: Coventry,’ father of the lord keeper, very few copies are known. Two years later Frewen published another manual with the title ‘Certaine Fruitfull Instructions for the generall cause of Reformation against the slanders of the Pope and League,’ 4to, London, 1589 (Wood, Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 823). In 1593 Frewen bought the Church House at Northiam, where he and his descendants continued to reside until the purchase of Brickwall, the present seat of the family. Church House still remains in the family. In 1598 he edited, and wrote the preface to, a pamphlet of eighty-eight pages, entitled ‘A Courteous Conference with the English Catholickes Romane, about the six articles ministered unto the Seminarie Priests,’ 4to, London. This loyal and excessively rare treatise had been left in manuscript by John Bishop, a recusant papist, a native of Battle, Sussex. Its design is to show the unlawfulness of revolting from the authority of the civil magistrate on account of religion. Frewen's uncompromising puritanism brought him at length into collision with some of his chief parishioners. At the Lewes summer assizes in 1611 they preferred a bill of indictment against him for nonconformity, but the grand jury ignored the bill, and Frewen vindicated himself in eight successive sermons, published as ‘Certaine Sermons on the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 verses of the Eleventh Chapter of S. Paule his Epistle to the Romanes. Preached in the parish church of Northiam, in the county of Sussex,’ 12mo, London, 1612. Copies are of comparatively rare occurrence. Exactly two hundred and fifty years later Octavius Lord, the then rector of Northiam, a descendant in the female line of Frewen, ‘re-preached’ them by request on eight successive Sundays in the same pulpit. In 1621 Frewen published his ‘Certaine choise grounds and principles of our Christian Religion, … wherein the people of the parish of Northiam, in the county of Sussex, have been catechized and instructed for the settling of their hearts and mindes in the
