Abednego Seller

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Abednego Seller (c.1646–1705) was an English churchman and controversial writer who refused to take the oaths to William III and Mary II. He was born in Plymouth and studied at Lincoln College, Oxford as a servitor, but left without a degree. He was ordained a deacon in 1665 and a priest in 1672. He served as rector of Combe-in-Teignhead from 1682 to 1686, then became vicar of Charles Church in Plymouth. After refusing the new oaths, he was deprived of the vicarage in 1690 and moved to London. He settled in Red Lion Square, and his valuable library was destroyed by fire in 1700. He died in London in 1705.

Seller left books, manuscripts, and coins. He gave to the Bodleian a late-15th-century manuscript containing William of Malmesbury’s De Gestis Pontificum and the Chronicon Lichfeldense. He donated Byzantine histories to Lincoln College. The rest of his books were to be sold to benefit his grandchildren. A copy of Bonaventure Vulcanius’s Thesaurus (1600) later went to the British Museum.

As a writer, Seller assisted William Cave in Historia Literaria (1688). He probably authored a letter defending the History of Passive Obedience (1689). He married Marie Persons at Abbotsham, near Bideford, on 2 December 1668.