1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oxenbridge, John

OXENBRIDGE, JOHN (1608–1674), English Nonconformist divine, was born at Daventry, Northamptonshire, on the 30th of January 1608, and was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Magdalen Hall, Oxford (B.A. 1628, M.A. 1631). As tutor of Magdalen Hall he drew up a new code of articles referring to the government of the college. He was deprived of his office in May 1634, and began to preach, with a similar disregard for constituted authority. After his voyages to the Bermudas he returned to England (1641), and after exercising an itinerant and unattached ministry settled for some months in Great Yarmouth and then at Beverley. He was minister at Berwick-on-Tweed when in October 1652 he was appointed a fellow of Eton College. There in 1658 he preached the funeral sermon of Francis Rous, the provost, and thence in 1660 he was ejected. He returned to his preaching at Berwick-on-Tweed, but was expelled by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, and after spending some time in the West Indies settled (1670) at Boston, Massachusetts, where he was ordained minister of the First Church. He died on the 28th of December 1674. A few sermons are all that he published. His first wife (d. 1658) was “a scholar beyond what was usual in her sex,” and Andrew Marvell, who was their friend, wrote an epitaph for her tomb at Eton which was defaced at the Restoration; his second wife (d. 1659) was Frances Woodward, daughter of the famous vicar of Bray; his third was a widow whom he met at Barbados.