It's either three or four letters.
The first is long-s. The last is e.
It could be she. I think this is most likely.
I'm not sure the first letter is a long-
s. If you compare it with the name Ursula in the next line, it looks much more like the
l than the
s. Even if it is an
s, it's hard to see how the word could be
she – t doesn't make sense in that position, and an
h would normally have a descender in this period, which this word does not have.
I also don't think an abbreviation of
senior is all that likely, and not just because I don't think the first letter is an
s. It would be normal only to differentiate when there was another adult of the same name. There was a younger Francis, but he was no more than 15 years old – probably quite a lot younger, as I have a theory that the child baptised in 1627 died young and there was a later child of the same name. But the more serious problem is that I've not found the words
senior and
junior to be not at all common at this time in England – the more usual term would be
the elder.
The father, Francis Stedman, was the vicar of the parish, and even if he was often absent (as many priests were), his name will have been familiar to the clerk who wrote up the register. So I don't think it can be the case that this word is actually part of the surname. A qualification or occupation seems most likely. None of his other children's baptisms that I've seen have a similar word there, but there is a word there on Ursula's burial record (attached) which fairly clearly reads
Cler with an overline denoting an abbreviation. This word
clericus was commonly used in Latin at this time to mean a priest, and the entry is partly in Latin.
My best guess is that the word in the baptism entry also says
cler with the loop before the
l being a vestigial
c. But I admit it's not at all clear, and I cannot see anything that looks similar elsewhere in the register. I'm not too concerned that it is written very differently to the
cler in the burial entry – that was 31 years later and is fairly clearly written in a different hand.