Richard Sherlock (priest)

Having entered holy orders, he became minister of several small united parishes in Ireland, where he remained till the breaking out of the rebellion of 1641.

Expelled from Oxford by the parliamentary visitors about 1648, he became curate of the neighbouring village of Cassington, where he dwelt in the same house as the mother of Anthony Wood, and made the acquaintance of the future antiquary, then a youth of seventeen.

On being ejected from Cassington in 1652, Sherlock became chaplain to Robert Bindlosse, a royalist baronet residing at Borwick Hall, near Lancaster.

He remained at St Oswald's Church, Winwick for the rest of his life, ‘so constantly resident that, in an incumbency of nearly thirty years, he was scarcely absent from his benefice as many weeks; so constant a preacher that, though he entertained three curates in his own houses, he rarely devolved that duty upon any of them; such a lover of monarchy that he never shaved his beard after the murder of Charles I; so frugal in his personal habits that the stipend of one of his curates would have provided for him; and so charitable that, out of one of the best benefices in England, he scarcely left behind him one year's income, and that for the most part to pious uses’.

Remaining unmarried, his rectory became a kind of training-school for young clergymen, among whom was his own nephew, Thomas Wilson, afterwards bishop of Sodor and Man.

Sherlock, who proceeded Doctor of Divinity (DD) at Dublin in 1660, died at Winwick on 20 June 1689, and was buried in his parish church.