Although the Conants are buried here, no stone or monument has been found to mark the spot where they lie. The Rector told the author that all the Conants had moved away, leaving none to care for the graves of their ancestors. This was probably the cause of the absence of any information by which the place of burial could be ascertained.
A brother of Roger’s--John, matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford--was made a full Fellow, 10th July, 1612; B.D., 2 Dec., 1619, or 28 June, 1620. He resigned his fellowship, and was instituted Rector of Lymington, a country parish near Ilchester, Somersetshire, on the presentation of Sir Henry Rosewell, and on the 20th of January, 1620, compounded for the firstfruits of the living--the sureties of his bond being his brothers Christopher and Roger. The name of Rosewell or Rowswell, is well known to students of the history of Massachusetts. Sir Henry’s name stands first among the grantees in the Patent from the Council of Plymouth--a fact which bears some significance to the emigration of Roger and Christopher to the New World, and also indicates that Conant had already espoused the cause of the Puritans.
The above is taken from the “History and Genealogy of the Conant Family,” and is necessary to connect Roger’s early life with the period of his emigration to the New World.
Roger was baptized at All Saints’ Church, East Budleigh, on the 9th April, 1592. He was the youngest of eight children. His after life showed that the integrity and piety which characterized his parents and elder brothers had been instilled into his mind in childhood. Like his brothers, he evidently received as good an education as the times would afford. He was employed to lay out boundaries, survey lands and transact other public business. The records of the Salters’ Company, to which he belonged, have been burned, so that no more authentic proof of his having been a freedman of the company can be adduced than the presumptive evidence given by the fact of his signing his brother John’s bonds as “Salter of London.” He married in London in November, 1618, and emigrated with the Pilgrims to New England in 1623.
Members of the Drysalters’ Guild of London (the ninth of the twelve great livery companies, and chartered by Queen Elizabeth in 1558) have certain privileges and perquisites. To illustrate this more fully, the author during a visit to London, at the time of the Queen’s Jubilee, 1887, learned upon enquiry that by the laws of primogeniture (only abolished in Upper Canada in 1841) the direct descendant of Roger Conant was entitled to two meals a day and a bed to sleep on. The perquisite is not retroactive and an application for any commutation could not be regarded, but he was told that the two meals a day and a bed would be given to the direct heir of Roger Conant, the Drysalter, whenever he chose to claim them.