History of the Church and Manor of Wigan.
Part II.
JOHN BRIDGEMAN was admitted to the rectory of Wigan on the 21st of January, 1615-16.
He was the eldest son of Mr. Thomas Bridgeman of Greenway, otherwise called Spyre Park, near Exeter, in the county of Devon, and grandson of Mr. Edward Bridgeman, sheriff of the city and county of Exeter for the year 1562-3.[1]
John Bridgeman was born at Exeter, in Cookrow Street, and christened at the church of St. Petrok’s in that city, in the parochial register of which is the following entry: “the seconde of November, a.d. 1577, John Bridgman, the son of Thomas Bridgman, was baptized.”
- ↑ Bishop John Bridgeman is rightly described by Sir Peter Leycester as the son of Mr. Thomas Bridgeman of Greenway, though Ormerod, in his History of Cheshire, who takes Leycester’s Historical Antiqities as the groundwork for his History, erroneously calls him the son of Edward Bridgeman, and Ormerod's mistake has been repeated by his later editor (Helsby’s ed. vol. i. p. 99). My authority for his parentage is the best that can be given, viz., a memorandum in his own handwriting, preserved among the family evidences at Weston. The Leger, or memorandum book, in which it occurs, is a MS. (marked No. 2) containing much valuable information, from which a list of loans, contributions and subsidies, and also of ship money, paid by the clergy of the diocese of Chester, between the years 1620 and 1639 inclusive, has been published in vol. xii. of the Record Society for Lancashire and Cheshire. The Leger refers chiefly to matters between the years 1608 and 1641, and contains more than 500 folio pages written in the minute and careful autograph of the bishop himself. It is in a good state of preservation, though a few of the early pages, containing transcripts of deeds connected with his paternal inheritance at Spyre Park, are damaged and partially corroded. This is the volume which will be generally referred to in this memoir, under the title of “Family Evidences,” where it is not otherwise specified.
