Wyman/Clifford/Saxton

In Dec 1672 a negro servant belonging to John Wyman Senior, being convicted 'of abuse offered to two of Wamesit Indians wounding them on the head and elsewhere' is sentenced to pay the Indians ten shillings - Middlesex County Court Records Vol III. page 47

The two Wyman brothers Francis and John were seventeen and fourteen in 1636 and so probably came over with their older uncles, Samuel and Thomas Richardson. The first definite record that we find of the Wyman brothers in New England is when the town order of Charlestown Village (Woburn) were signed in 1640; which the Richardsons and Wymans all signed. By that date the Wymans were 21 and 18. John Wyman the brother of Francis was made a freeman 26 May 1647 at age 25, and Francis a freeman 1657. Later in 1658 Francis Wyman Sr. in his will said '.. do give and bequeth unto my two sons Francis Wyman and John Wyman which are beyound sea ten pounds a piece of Lawful English money to be paid unto them by mine executor if they be in want and come over to demand the same.' The Wymans built on what became Wyman St. in Woburn, and by 1666 they had also built country farms in what is now Burlington, a few miles north, on what became the Billerica boundary. Overlooked by many is the fact that a grant of land was made in Woburn on 25 Feb 1679 to a John Wyman, a wheelwright. This was not Lt. John Wyman the brother of Francis, but rather the son of Thomas and Ann (Godfrey) Wyman and hence the nephew of the Wyman brothers. This John was know and Sergant John Wyman.

There is also found in Boston a tailor named Thomas Wyman or Wayman who was in the 1675 war against the Narragansett Indians. He is believed by some to be the son of the brother Richard Wyman, hence another nephew of Francis and John Wyman. He was the second officer in the only cavalry troops the English had at the Narraganset Fort fight, Dec 19, 1675. In this fight his son John was killed, but he escaped with a wound in his cheek from an Indian arrow. He was a tanner He 'brought' a servant Robert Simpson to manage his tan yard. With his brother Francis, the largest tandorium in Woburn. These two brothers had brought the Cottemore grant of 500 acres for 50 pounds. They opposed the rite of infant baptism and were sent to the ecclesiastical court in Cambridge on charges of staying away from church and turning their backs on the rite of infant baptism. However several other prominent citizens of Woburn were with them and nothing happened.'

In 1671 Francis, John and eleven other Woburn citizens were prosecuted before the Middlesex County Court for publicly manifesting contempt for the ordinance of infant baptism and for attending the then illegal assemblies of the Anabaptists. No serious action was taken against them and both were later reconciled with the parish church. John seems to have been wholly mollified, for in his will he left 409 each to the two town ministers (one, Rev Thomas Carter, was his son's father-inlaw). Francis was less penitent; in his will he left 209 each to two elders of the Baptist Church at Boston.