Lady Alice Clarke

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lady Alice Clarke (1540–1590), a 14× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Norfolk birth, marriage to William George Wilson, her son William Wilson, her death in Lincolnshire, and Elizabethan-era English context. Notable: she carries the courtesy style 'Lady,' suggesting standing among the minor English gentry of the Tudor period.

Lady Alice Clarke (1540–1590) was born in Great Ellingham, a parish in the county of Norfolk in the east of England, and died half a century later at Quadring in Lincolnshire on the eighteenth day of June, 1590. The courtesy title of 'Lady' preserved in the family record suggests that she belonged to the minor gentry of Tudor England, a class which by the middle of the sixteenth century occupied an important place between the great noble houses and the freeholding yeomanry of the English countryside.

The England into which Alice was born was a kingdom in the midst of profound religious and political change. Her birth fell during the latter years of the reign of Henry VIII, and her life thereafter spanned the brief reign of Edward VI, the Catholic restoration under Mary I, and the long Elizabethan era that did so much to shape the character of the English-speaking world. Norfolk and Lincolnshire, the two counties bracketing her life, were among the most prosperous agricultural regions of the realm, given over to grain, wool, and the marshland husbandry of the fens.

Alice was united in marriage to William George Wilson, and her removal from Norfolk to Lincolnshire was likely occasioned by that union, as the customs of the period generally drew a wife into the household and parish of her husband. To this marriage was born at least one son, William Wilson, who survived his mother by some thirty-five years and died in 1625, in the early years of the reign of Charles I.

Through this son, the line descended in time across the Atlantic, eventually flowing into the family registered in these pages. Lady Alice Clarke stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a fourteenth great-grandmother, one of the more distant English forebears whose name has been preserved against the long passage of years.