John Owen (1616-1683)
by Sinclair B. Ferguson
John Owen was born at Stadham, or Stadhampton, near Oxford, in the year 1616. The second son of Henry Owen, the local Puritan vicar, John had three brothers, William, Henry, and Philemon, and one sister, whose Christian name is unrecorded but whose married name was Singleton.
Almost nothing is known of the intimate details of the Owen household. In a rare comment on his upbringing, Owen later wrote that his father was “a Nonconformist all his days, and a painful labourer in the vineyard of the Lord.” When he was about ten, he went to a small grammar school in the parish of All Saints, Oxford, in preparation for his entrance to Queen’s College at the age of twelve. He matriculated in Oxford University on 4 November 1631, which required his subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and graduated B.A. on June 11, 1632.
