Person:John Payton (4)

From Noake's Worcestershire:

Dissent was frightfully coerced, punished, and excommunicated, but not put down, at Dudley in the seventeenth century. The poor Quakers were specially scarified. In 1666, "Thomas Payto'n, late of Dudley, tailor, a professed Quaker, taken at a conventicle of Quakers, in the said town of Dudley, a place much infested with Quakers and disorderly persona, and committed to ye gaol 10th July, and being a stubborn and incorrigible person, was at ye next sessions following tendered the oath of allegiance, which he refused to take, was indicted, and convicted of premunire." Shortly afterwards, one John Payton's house in this town was entered by officers violently at night, when they seized £32 worth of goods, and carried them into the parish church till they were sold, and Payton was fined 10s. for his wife being at a religious meeting, though she was in reality not there.

1. ↑ Register of Births, Marriages and Burials from the Monthly Meeting of Dudley in the county of Worcestershire from 1656 to 1827
   RG6 / Piece 1428 / Folio 27.