Nearly every family of the name furnished
a preacher. A few members of it attained the dignity of knighthood.
A greater number became landed property-holders, and more were
engaged in trade in London. Sir Henry Sherman was one of the
executors of the will of Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, May 23, 1521.
William Sherman, Esq., purchased Knightston in the time of Henry
VIII; and a monument to him is in Ottery St. Mary, dated 1542. As
a rule the family belonged to the middle class and were engaged in
active occupations, earning their own bread, with a strong sense of
their rights and liberties as Englishmen.

The principal family of the name in the 16th century were the
Shermans of Yaxley in the county of Suffolk, a full detail of which
is given in Davy's Collections of that county. Edmond Sherman,
my ancestor, was a member of this family. He was born in 1585 and
was married to Judith Angier, May 26, 1611. He resided at Dedham,
Essex county, England, then a place of some importance. He was a
manufacturer of cloth, a man of means and high standing. He was
a Puritan, with all the faults and virtues of a sectary. He resisted
ship-money and the tax unlawfully imposed on tonnage and poundage.
He had the misfortune to live at the time when Charles I undertook
to dispense with Parliament, and to impose unlawful taxes and
burdens upon the people of England, and when the privileges of the
nobility were enforced with great severity by judges dependent upon
the crown. He had three sons, John, baptized on the 4th of January,
1614; Edmond, baptized June 18, 1616, and Samuel, baptized July
12, 1618. He had a nephew, known as "Captain John," somewhat older
than his sons, who was an active man in 1634.

At this time the migration to Boston, caused chiefly by the tyranny
of Charles I, was in active operation. Hume, in his history, says:

"The Puritans, restrained in England, shipped themselves off for
America, and laid there the foundations of a government which
possessed all the liberty, both civil and religious, of which they
found themselves bereaved in their native country. But their
enemies, unwilling that they should anywhere enjoy ease and
contentment, and dreading, perhaps, the dangerous consequences of
so disaffected a colony, prevailed on the king to issue a proclamation,
debarring those devotees access, even into those inhospitable
deserts. Eight ships, lying in the Thames, and ready to sail, were
detained by or