His actual views are known from surviving sermons, perhaps reconstituted from notes; those held by the Grindletonians may well have differed considerably from those attributed to them by opponents in polemics.
He was born on 4 August 1586, at Marland, then a hamlet in the parish of Rochdale, where Thomas Brereley, his father, and Roger, his grandfather, were farmers.
He married Ann Hardman in 1615 and left six children - Alice, Thomas, Mary, John, Roger & Abel.
His literary remains are: Brereley had a local following, attracting worshippers from the nearby Giggleswick parish of Christopher Shute, but became more widely known after the proceedings against him.
[2] In a sermon preached at Paul's Cross on 11 February 1627, and published under the title of The White Wolfe, 1627, Stephen Denison, minister of St. Catherine Cree, charges the 'Gringltonian (sic) familists' with holding nine points of an antinomian tendency.
Henry Hoyle, through his founding of the congregation in a redundant chapel at Grindleton, to his return from imprisonment in York, where he faced charges of heterodoxy, in October 1617.