William Field

William Field (6 January 1768 – 16 August 1851) was an English Unitarian minister.

Early life Field was born at Stoke Newington on 6 January 1768, the son John Field, his father, a London medical practitioner, and founder of the London Annuity Society, and his wife Anne Cromwell, daughter of Thomas Cromwell, a grocer, and sister of Oliver Cromwell (c.1742–1821), the biographer and lawyer; the apothecary Henry Field was his brother.

While at school Field corresponded with his father in Latin. He studied for the ministry first at Homerton College, but left for doctrinal reasons soon after the appointment of John Fell. In 1788 he entered Daventry Academy under Thomas Belsham, and left when Belsham resigned (June 1789). Her father was a Baptist minister, the Rev. William Wilkins of Buryfield House, Bourton-on-the-Water, who became assistant to Benjamin Beddome in 1777, continuing to 1795 in Bourton. He was later minister in Cirencester, where he was succeeded in 1804 by the Rev. Daniel White. He died in 1812.

William and Mary Field had thirteen children. By 1829 Ferdinand was in New York, where he became a good friend and hiking companion of the poet William Cullen Bryant, whom he saw on later visits Bryant made to England. In 1836 the hardware company was founded, and it began to trade from a New York office in 1840, as Field, Parker & Field. When Bryant was in England in the summer of 1845, he visited the Fields in Warwick and Birmingham. He thought Mary Field "a very remarkable woman". Horace Field (1823-1879) was an architect and District Surveyor of Putney. His son, Horace Field, was a successful artistic architect.

Publications Field's major works were his history of Warwick and his life of Samuel Parr. He published many pamphlets and sermons: they included

"Letter to the Inhabitants of Warwick," &c., 1791. "Letter to the Inhabitants ... of Kenilworth," &c., 1848.

Other publications were:

A Series of Questions ... as a Guide to the Critical Study of the Four Gospels, &c., 1794; second edition, printed 1805; recommended in the Critical Review (June 1794) to theological students. Copies were issued from time to time for private use (with various title-pages), but it was not published till 1846, with large introduction An Historical and Descriptive Account of ... Warwick and ... Leamington, &c., Warwick, 1815, (anon., "advertisement" signed W. F.; plates). Memoirs of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D., 1828, 2 vols.

Field was a frequent contributor of critical and other articles to the Monthly Repository and Christian Reformer.