Elizabeth Alice Clarke

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Alice Clarke (1571–1630), a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Suffolk, her parentage, her daughter Elizabeth Townes, her death in Norfolk, and Elizabethan/early Stuart era context in East Anglia. Notable: among the earliest documented English ancestors in the archive, situated in the maritime communities of Suffolk and Norfolk.

Elizabeth Alice Clarke (1571–1630) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the Hyten family archive, her life bridging the late Elizabethan and early Stuart eras of English history. She was born on the 19th of August, 1571, in the parish of Blundeston in the Waveney District of Suffolk, a small East Anglian community set within the gently rolling country near the Norfolk border. She was the daughter of John Joseph Clarke, who died in 1610, and Lady Rose Alis Fenne, who survived her husband by nine years and passed in 1619.

The England of Elizabeth's childhood was a realm in flux. Born thirteen years into the reign of Elizabeth I, she came of age during a period of expanding maritime commerce, religious reformation, and the steady rise of the East Anglian wool and herring trades. Suffolk and Norfolk in this era were among the more prosperous and populous regions of the kingdom, their market towns and coastal ports threaded together by an active mercantile life. The transition from Tudor to Stuart rule in 1603, the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, and the gathering tensions that would later erupt in civil war all unfolded across the span of her adult years.

Elizabeth is recorded as the mother of a daughter, also named Elizabeth, who would later be known by the surname Townes and who died in 1639. Through this daughter the Clarke line was carried forward into succeeding generations of the family.

Elizabeth Alice Clarke died on the 7th of September, 1630, in Great Yarmouth, within the Borough of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk — one of the busiest fishing and trading ports on the English east coast. She was at most fifty-nine years of age at her passing.

Elizabeth was the compiler's 12× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.