Oliver Mathews

[1] He wrote the first history of Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire, England, on the River Severn, although as Hugh Owen and John Brickdale Blakeway point out, it contains "strange and unauthorised assertions", and is not considered reliable.

[4] Antiquary Richard Williams writes that they had "settled for many generations" near Caersws at Park farm, where he says Oliver Mathews appears to have been born.

[2] He moved to Shrewsbury, and on 19 April 1560 was admitted as a half-brother to the Mercers Company,[3] which included an Apothecaries guild,[1] to trade in "Poticarye and Grocerye".

[3] In 1571, Queen Elizabeth I gave the Manor of Arwystli to Robert Dudley, causing Mathews to complain of the "given awaie of the parkes of Caersouse from the burgesses to keep the King's breeding Mares.

"[7] Mathews frequently served as warden of the Mercer's Company until 6 August 1572, when he paid to become a full brother and freeman, which was the last time he appears in their records.

He obtained a lease from the Crown from 22 June 1580 for six acres of land and all tithes of grain from the town and fields of Cleobury Mortimer for twenty-one years;[3] these had been possessions of the dissolved Wigmore Priory, employed for the maintenance of a sexton for the parish church.

[10][note 2] One source, William Allport Leighton, reports that Mathews married again on 30 November 1602 at Church Stoke, but the name of this second wife is not legible in the parish records.

[8] Morgan states that Mathews' family held Park farm near Caersws for many generations, until the early nineteenth century, and Hamer reported in 1869 that "several living persons remember the Matthews family residing at the Park", with one old man of that name still living in the area who claimed to be a descendant of Oliver Mathews.