Bridget Brand

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Bridget Brand (c.1570–1632), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her baptism in Boxford, Suffolk; her parentage by Sir John Brand and Mary Luffkin; her marriage to Richard Edward Freshwater; her son Edwardi Freshwater; and Elizabethan-Jacobean East Anglian context.

Bridget Brand was born on the seventeenth of December, 1570, in the parish of Boxford, in the county of Suffolk, England, and departed this life in July of 1632 at Heybridge, in the neighbouring county of Essex. She stood thus in her eighty-first year at the time of her decease, having lived through one of the more turbulent and consequential epochs in the history of the English nation.

She was the daughter of Sir John Brand, who died in 1610, and of Mary Luffkin. The knighthood borne by her father places the household among the gentry of late-Tudor Suffolk, a region then notable for its prosperous wool trade, its substantial parish churches, and its strong currents of Protestant religious sentiment in the generation following the Elizabethan Settlement. The wool towns of Suffolk, of which Boxford was one, formed part of the economic backbone of the realm during her youth.

Bridget was joined in marriage to Richard Edward Freshwater, and of that union there was born a son, Edwardi Freshwater, who came into the world in 1603 and lived until 1660. The early years of Edwardi's life thus coincided with the closing months of Elizabeth I's long reign and the accession of James I, while his mother's final years unfolded under the reign of Charles I, in the very decade preceding the outbreak of the English Civil War.

That Bridget removed in her later life from Suffolk to Heybridge in Essex suggests the ordinary movement of an English family of station within the eastern counties, a country of marshes, market towns, and parish life that would, within a single generation of her death, send many of its sons and daughters across the Atlantic to the New World plantations.

Bridget Brand was the compiler's eleven-times-great-grandmother in the paternal-grandfather, or PP, line of descent.