John Jewell, Bishop of Salisbury, was born in 1522, at the village of Buden, near Ilfracombe, Devonshire. He studied at Oxford, and in 1546 openly professed the tenets of the Reformers. Having obtained the living of Sunningwell, Berks, he distinguished himself by his zeal and assiduity as a parish priest, but at the accession of Queen Mary, to avoid persecution as a heretic, he escaped to the Continent and became vice-master of a college at Strasbourg.