Lady Rose Alis Fenne

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lady Rose Alis Fenne (1541–1619), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Suffolk birth and death, her parentage in the Fenne/Fynnes family, her marriage to John Joseph Clarke, and her daughter Elizabeth Alice Clarke. Notable: Tudor- and Stuart-era English gentry ancestress bearing the courtesy style of Lady.

Lady Rose Alis Fenne (1541–1619) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, holding the position of a thirteenth great-grandmother. She was born on the twenty-ninth of November, 1541, in Suffolk, England, into the Fenne — sometimes rendered Fynnes — family, her father being recorded as William John Fenne. Her birth fell in the closing years of the reign of Henry VIII, an England still settling into the religious and social upheavals of the Reformation, when the gentry of Suffolk occupied a position of considerable local consequence between London and the wool-producing market towns of East Anglia.

The courtesy style of "Lady" attached to her name in the family register suggests a household of standing within the Suffolk gentry, though the specific honors and lands of the Fenne family lie beyond what the present archive can verify. Suffolk in this period was a county of timbered manors, parish churches of flint and freestone, and a tradition of literate landholding families whose names recurred in the rolls of justices and sheriffs.

Rose was joined in marriage to John Joseph Clarke, and from this union the register preserves the name of one daughter, Elizabeth Alice Clarke, who survived her mother by some eleven years and died in 1630. Through Elizabeth the line descended onward across the Atlantic in later generations, eventually flowing into the families whose names the Hyten archive gathers together.

Lady Rose lived to the considerable age of seventy-seven, having seen the long reign of Elizabeth I in its entirety and the accession of James I. She died on the thirtieth of January, 1619, at Bundeston in the parish of Fixton, Suffolk, the same county in which she had been born and had passed her days.

Lady Rose Alis Fenne was the compiler's thirteenth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.