Samuel Fisher (c.1605–buried 5 September 1681) was an English Puritan clergyman and writer, who was committed to a Presbyterian polity. After serving as a rural rector in Shropshire during the period of Charles I's absolute monarchy, he worked in London and Shrewsbury during the English Civil War and under the Commonwealth and in Cheshire during the Protectorate. After the Great Ejection of 1662 he settled in Birmingham, where he worked as a nonconformist preacher. The precise course of his career is a matter of some controversy. Identity This article concerns a Presbyterian minister who served at Shrewsbury approximately between 1645 and 1650 and afterwards at Thornton-le-Moors in Cheshire, retiring to Birmingham after his ejection. There were several Puritan clergy named Samuel Fisher and their lives seem to have become confused in some of the sources. The namesake with whom he is most often confused was a contemporary Puritan minister of Lydd who became a Quaker. An article of considerable length is devoted to this man's life in Athenae Oxonienses, a generally reliable early source. The important Victorian archivist and genealogist Joseph Foster incorporated the same birth and academic details in his Alumni Oxonienses, while also featuring other men called Samuel Fisher of the same period. From these, the Dictionary of National Biography article selected details, beginning with birth at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1617, as the basis for the subject of this article. In his much more recent article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Stephen Wright has proposed that the early life and academic records of the two ministers have been transposed, making Northampton the Presbyterian minister's birthplace. Barbara Coulton's recent Regime and Religion, a study of Shrewsbury through the Reformation and English Civil War, states that the Shrewsbury Samuel Fisher was not the one born at Stratford, suggesting that a new consensus has now emerged that allows a biographical thread to be traced. However, it is not universal: the ODNB article on the Quaker minister still gives him the same parentage and academic record as Wright proposes for the Presbyterian minister who forms the subject of this article. Early life and education Stephen Wright identifies the Presbyterian Fisher as the son of John Fisher of Northampton, born late in 1605 or early in 1606, who matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford in 1623. The argument for this takes into account the matriculation record, which gives this individual's age as 18.