William John Fenne\Fynnes 11GGM

William John Fenne, also recorded in surviving documents under the variant spelling Fynnes, was born in the year 1510 in the market town of Bourne, in the county of Lincolnshire, England. He departed this life on the third day of March, 1558, at Wiggenhall-St. Mary-The-Virgin, a parish lying in the fen country of Norfolk along the River Great Ouse. His mother is known to the family record as Alice Aldington; of his father, the archive preserves no certain account.

William's lifetime fell within one of the most turbulent chapters of English history. Born in the second year of the reign of King Henry VIII, he came of age amid the upheavals of the English Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the successive religious settlements of Edward VI and Mary I. His death in March of 1558 occurred only months before the accession of Elizabeth I in November of that same year — a transition that would reshape the religious and political life of every English parish, including those of the Lincolnshire and Norfolk fens in which the Fenne family was rooted. The fen districts of eastern England in this era were communities of farmers, drainage laborers, and parish gentry, and the surname Fenne itself bespeaks a family long associated with that distinctive landscape of marsh, dyke, and waterway.

Of William's marriage the present record preserves no name, though it is from his line that the family descends. To him is attributed a daughter, Lady Rose Alis Fenne, whose own life extended into the early Stuart period and who died in the year 1619, more than sixty years after her father's passing. The honorific borne by Rose suggests that the Fenne family held standing of some note in the gentry of its district.

William John Fenne stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a fifteenth great-grandfather, among the earliest English forebears whom the archive can name with assurance of date and place.