Lady Agnes Anne Massey Mayce Macey of Colyton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lady Agnes Anne Massey (Mayce, Macey) of Colyton (1523–1585), a 15× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Colyton, Devon, England, her marriage to Sir Raynold John Clarke, and her son John Joseph Clarke. Notable: Tudor-era English gentry ancestor predating the family's eventual migration to the American colonies.

Lady Agnes Anne Massey — her surname variously rendered Mayce or Macey in the surviving registers — was born on the fifteenth of May, 1523, in the parish of Colyton, in the county of Devon, England. She lived the whole of her recorded life within the bounds of that ancient market town, and there she died on the ninth of April, 1585, in her sixty-second year.

Colyton in the sixteenth century was a settled and prosperous Devon parish, set in the valley of the River Coly a few miles inland from the Channel coast. Agnes's life spanned a period of profound transformation in English religious and civil affairs: born in the latter years of Henry VIII, she would have witnessed in her lifetime the break with Rome, the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI, the Marian restoration of Catholicism, and at last the long Elizabethan settlement under which she died. The gentry families of Devon, of which the Masseys were one, navigated these shifts with care, and the parish registers begun under Thomas Cromwell in 1538 are the very documents that preserve names such as hers for posterity.

Agnes was joined in marriage to Sir Raynold John Clarke of Colyton, a union that allied two Devon houses of standing. Of their issue, the records preserve a son, John Joseph Clarke, who lived until 1610 and through whom the line descends. Through this son the Clarke name was carried forward, eventually crossing the Atlantic in later generations and entering, by long course of descent, the ancestry that the present compiler has undertaken to gather.

The particulars of Agnes's daily life, her household, and her personal character have not survived the intervening four centuries. What endures is the framework of her dates, her place, and her people — the spare but certain scaffolding upon which her memory is hung.

Lady Agnes was the compiler's fifteenth-great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.