William Chedsey
English priest

William Chedsey (or Cheadsey) (1510?–1574?) was an English Roman Catholic priest and academic, who became archdeacon of Middlesex in 1556 and President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1558.
Life
He was a native of Somerset. He was admitted a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 10 March 1528, elected a probationer fellow there on 13 October 1531, and two years later a full fellow. He graduated M.A. in 1534, B.D. in 1542, and D.D. in 1546, having about that time subscribed the thirty-four articles. He became chaplain to Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, who collated him on 9 July 1548 to the prebend of Twyford in St Paul's Cathedral.
In 1549 he distinguished himself in a public disputation with Peter Martyr, held in the divinity school at Oxford. After the disgrace of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset Chedsey inveighed openly at Oxford against the reformed doctrines, and in consequence was, by an order in council of 10 March 1551, committed to the Marshalsea prison for seditious preaching; he was imprisoned till 11 November 1551, when he was moved to the house of Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely.
On the accession of Queen Mary he regained his liberty and received several marks of royal favour. He was presented by the queen to the living of All Saints, Bread Street, London; a few days later Bonner collated him to the prebend of Chiswick in St Paul's; and by letters patent, dated 4 October the same year, he was appointed a canon of the collegiate chapel of St. George at Windsor.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Chedsey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.