William John Fenne\Fynnes 11GGM

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William John Fenne (also rendered Fynnes), 1510–1558, a fourteen-times great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Lincolnshire, death in Norfolk, his recorded daughter Lady Rose Alis Fenne, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: the family bore the variant surnames Fenne and Fynnes and produced at least one titled descendant.

William John Fenne, also entered in the records under the variant spelling Fynnes, was born in the year 1510 at Bourne, in Lincolnshire, England, and departed this life on the third day of March, 1558, at Wiggenhall-St. Mary-The-Virgin, in the county of Norfolk. He stands in the paternal-grandfather line of the compiler as a fourteen-times great-grandfather, one of the most distant English forebears whom the family register preserves by name.

His lifetime, spanning the first half of the sixteenth century, placed him squarely within the turbulent Tudor age. A man born in 1510 came into the world during the early reign of Henry VIII, lived through the great religious upheavals of the English Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the brief reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, and died in the very year that Elizabeth I ascended the throne. The eastern counties of Lincolnshire and Norfolk, where his life began and ended, were among the most prosperous regions of Tudor England, sustained by wool, agriculture, and the trade of the North Sea ports.

That William's recorded place of death lay in Norfolk while his birthplace was in Lincolnshire suggests a relocation across the fenlands during the course of his life, though the particulars of that movement, his occupation, and his station are not preserved in the family record. The variant surname forms Fenne and Fynnes, both retained in the archive, were characteristic of an age in which English orthography had not yet been fixed and a single family might be entered under several spellings in parish and manorial registers alike.

Of his issue, the family register names a daughter, Lady Rose Alis Fenne, who survived him by more than sixty years and died in 1619. The title borne by his daughter indicates that the family moved within the gentry of Tudor and early Stuart England.

William was the compiler's fourteen-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather line.