Samuel Jones was at Abergavenny under Roger Griffiths (q.v.). When Griffiths conformed (1702), it is alleged that the Academy was transferred to Knill, Rads., in charge of John Weaver, but this is incorrect — it was to Shrewsbury, under the care of James Owen (q.v.), that Samuel Jones and the other students removed. On James Owen's death (1706), Jones went to Leiden; he returned to England in 1708 and opened an academy at Gloucester, removing it in [the spring of] 1712 to Tewkesbury, where his house still stands [it was attacked by the mob in 1714]; he remained a layman. He was a notable scholar in the classics and in Hebrew, but he published nothing [a contemporary satire on Tewkesbury refers to him as ‘Gamaliel sage of Cambrian breed’]. The most famous of his pupils were the future bishop Joseph Butler and the future archbishop Thomas Secker; Secker, in a letter (1711) to Isaac Watts, speaks most highly of the academy and of Samuel Jones himself, though he has a later reference to him which says that he tippled overmuch and had become lazy and bad-tempered. The best-known of Jones's Welsh pupils is Vavasor Griffths (q.v.). [Jones was an Independent, and the Presbyterian Fund Board sent him no pupils before 1714. He d. 11 Oct. 1719 aged 37 — ‘in coelos accitus est anno aetatis 38, Octob. 11, 1719’ says his tombstone; he was buried behind the chancel of Tewkesbury abbey.] His nephew Jeremiah (above) removed the academy to Nailsworth. Samuel Jones's wife was a Judith Weaver; she afterwards m. Edward Godwin (one of her husband's pupils), and is separately noticed under that surname.

Also, according to NLW MS. 10327 (Walter J. Evans), he had another nephew, Joshua (d. 1740), minister at Nailsworth and Manchester, and a niece who m. one Jackson and who had a son, Samuel — he was educated at Llwyn-llwyd, and, like his uncles, was minister at Nailsworth.

S.J. may have left Shrewsbury in 1704 and spent a year at Moorfields, under Chauncey, before going to Leiden (Cofiadur, 1958, 10, 20-1).