Adoniram Byfield

The surviving minutes of the Assembly, which according to a project to have them published "arguably constitute the most important unpublished religious text of seventeenth-century Britain", run to over half a million words and are almost all in Byfield's writing.

For their trouble they received the copyright of the Directory of Public Worship (ordered to be published 13 March 1645), which they sold for £400.

At some unknown date between 1649 and 1654 Byfield received an appointment to the rectory of Collingbourn Ducis, Wiltshire, from which Christopher Prior, D.D., had been removed.

Samuel Butler in Hudibras' made him iconic of those zealots for presbytery whose tactics opened the way to independency.

Byfield's most important work consists of the manuscript minutes, or rough notes, of the debates in the assembly, which are almost entirely in his very difficult handwriting.