ADAMS, Ann

Ann Adams, the wife of Ferdinando Adams*, probably arrived in New England with her husband in 1637. She was received into the church at Dedham, Massachusetts, on 2 September 1639, ‘with very good satisfaction and testimony of the frute of gods ordinances in the church in hir conversion to god’.

She returned to Suffolk after her husband – ‘his wife being sent for by him departed to England 1642’ – probably with their children, born and baptised at Dedham: Abigail, Bethia and Nathaniel (born after his father's departure).

ADAMS, Ferdinando

Ferdinando Adams, a shoemaker, was a churchwarden at St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich, Suffolk, in 1636. Samuel Ward (ODNB), town preacher at Ipswich from 1605, had been suspended by the Court of High Commission in November 1635. Adams then refused to unlock the church for the church authorities when they came on a visitation in 1636. He was excommunicated for refusing to put the communion table in place of seats against the east wall of the chancel, and for failing to remove a wall inscription of Mark 11.17 (‘My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves’). Clement Corbet (ODNB), chancellor of the diocese of Norwich, told his bishop, Matthew Wren: ‘We heard … of the business concerning Adames.