Rowland Taylor

Rowland Taylor (sometimes spelled "Tayler") (6 October 1510 – 9 February 1555) was an English Protestant martyr during the Marian Persecutions.

At the time of his death by burning at the stake, he was Rector of a small parish in a market town, Hadleigh in Suffolk.

Taylor was born in Northumberland. In 1530, he received his LL.B. degree from Cambridge University. From 1531 to 1538 he was principal of Borden Hostel. In 1534 he received the LL.D. from Cambridge, the same year Martin Luther completed his German Bible. One year later, in 1535, William Tyndale was tried and denounced as a heretic for his new English Bible translation. Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536. Taylor's wife - Margaret Tyndale - was William Tyndale's niece.

Taylor's troubles began on 25 July 1553. He was arrested just six days after the new queen, Mary I, ascended the throne. Aside from the fact that Taylor had supported Lady Jane Grey, Mary's rival, he was also charged with heresy for having preached a sermon in Bury St Edmunds denouncing the Roman Catholic practice of clerical celibacy, which required that a priest in holy orders be unmarried. Many English clergymen, including Taylor, had abandoned this teaching since the 1530s as a token of the English Reformation.

Taylor also denounced the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which is the belief that the two elements (bread and wine) taken during Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Since the Roman Catholic position is that the Eucharist (and the miracle of transubstantiation) is a sacrament commanded by God, anyone denying it, particularly a cleric or pastor, is considered a heretic. This teaching was opposed universally by the Reformed and Protestant Churches, who maintained that, since a sacrament is a sign, it cannot also be the thing signified. For similar reasons relating to the problem of idolatry, Taylor took issue with the Roman Catholic form of the Mass and received much support from the villagers of Hadleigh.

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