Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Newman, Samuel
NEWMAN, SAMUEL (1600?–1663), concordance maker, was born at Chadlington, Oxfordshire, about 1600. Towards the end of 1616, being then aged 16, he entered at Magdalen College, Oxford; he removed to St. Edmund Hall, and graduated B.A. on 17 Oct. 1620. Subsequently he held a small living in Oxfordshire; owing to his persistent nonconformity he was subjected to prosecutions, to avoid which he removed from place to place. After his seventh removal he resolved on emigration to New England. He settled as minister at Dorchester, Massachusetts, about the end of 1636; removed to Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1638; and in 1644 became the first minister of Rehoboth, Massachusetts. There he died on 5 July 1663.
He published with his initials, ‘A large and complete Concordance to the Bible … according to the last Translation. First collected by Clement Cotton, and now much enlarged,’ &c., 1643, fol. (‘Advertisement’ prefixed by Daniel Featley [q. v.]); other editions are 1650, fol.; 1658, fol.; Cambridge, 1683, 4to; 5th edit. 1720, fol. The work is often called the ‘Cambridge Concordance,’ and has been erroneously described as the first concordance to the English Bible; the first (1550) was by John Marbeck or Merbeck [q. v.] Cotton's (1631) was the first concordance to the authorised version.
[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. (Bliss), iii. 648; Wood's Fasti (Bliss), i. 392; Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702, iii. 113 sq. (makes Banbury his birthplace); Allibone's Dict. of Engl. Lit. 1870, ii. 1413.]