Mildred "Mary" Scott

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mildred 'Mary' Scott (1500–1550), a 15× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth at Scotts Hall in Kent, her marriage to Sir Robert Hicks, Earl of Gainsborough, her son Gilbert Hicks, and her death in Wiltshire. Notable: early Tudor-era English gentry ancestry.

Mildred Scott, called Mary in certain family records, was born in the year 1500 at Scotts Hall in the County of Kent, England, and departed this life on the eleventh day of May, 1550, at Stapleford in the County of Wiltshire. Her span of fifty years fell wholly within the turbulent reign of the early Tudor monarchs — an age in which the English realm passed under the rule of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and the boy-king Edward VI, and in which the Reformation reshaped the religious and social fabric of the gentry families to which she belonged.

Scotts Hall, the place of her birth, was the long-established seat of the Scott family of Kent, a household of standing in the southeastern shires. From this Kentish lineage Mildred passed by marriage into the house of Hicks, becoming the wife of Sir Robert Hicks, styled in the records as Earl of Gainsborough. The union joined two families of armigerous English rank and carried Mildred from the orchards and downs of Kent across the south of England to the chalk country of Wiltshire, where she ended her days in the parish of Stapleford upon the river Wylye.

Of the issue of this marriage, the family register preserves the name of a son, Gilbert Hicks, through whom the line continued and through whom the blood of the Scotts of Kent passed forward across the generations that would, in time, cross the Atlantic and find its way into the American branches gathered in this archive.

Mildred's own years were lived in an England still ordered by manor and parish, before the great voyages of colonization, and her death in 1550 came on the eve of the religious settlements that would define the latter half of the century. She stands in this register as a 15× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather line, an early link in the long chain of English ancestry preserved within the Hyten family record.