♂Harry Vye

Harry Vye (living 1539) was a man of the parish of Colyton in Devon, England, whose daughter Agnes married there in 1539, barely a year after the parish began to keep its register.

Family

He may have been the Henry Vye assessed on his goods in Colyton Hundred for the subsidy of 1524, which would make him a grown man by then. Colyton’s register begins in 1538, the year Thomas Cromwell^W ordered every parish in England to record its baptisms, marriages and burials. On 5 October 1539 his daughter Agnes, of the hamlet of Cadhayne in the parish, married John Mychell of Rawkerhayne at Colyton. The entry names the fathers of both bride and groom, and it gives Harry as “Harrye Vye”.

His children were Agnes, Robert, John, Ellen, Johane, Edythe, Harry, Edmond, Alice and Elizabeth. The register buries his wife Johane in 1547. Two daughters married at Colyton: Ellen to John Tygon in 1548/49, and Johane to Robert Whiker in 1550, both with Harrye as the bride’s father.

Death and will

A Harry Vye of Colyton made his will on 2 October 1558, asking to be buried in Colyton church, and it was proved in London before the month was out. Every child he named was still under age, and none was called Agnes. The married daughters, Agnes among them, are left out of the will.

Lines of descent

He was probably the twelfth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Agnes Vye (married 1539).

Notes

Sources

The marriage of 5 October 1539 comes from the FreeREG transcript of the Colyton St Andrew register, which gives “John MYCHELL of Rawkerhayne” and “Agnes VYE of Caddhayne”, the groom’s father as John Mychell and the bride’s father as “Harrye VYE”. FamilySearch’s collection of the Devon registers has the same marriage. The 1558 will is preserved in the registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W; it opens “I Harrye Vye of the parishe of Colyton”. Harry and Henry are forms of the same name, and Burton W. Spear’s Search for the Passengers of the Mary & John 1630 (vol. 23) calls Agnes a daughter of “Henry Vye”, naming no record.

Identity of the testator

The will is by “Harrye Vye of the parishe of Colyton”, dated 2 October 1558 and proved in London on 29 October 1558 (Prerogative Court of Canterbury). The Colyton register buries “Harrye Vye, Caden” on 11 October 1558, nine days after the will’s date. Caden is the hamlet the 1539 entry calls Caddhayne, under another spelling.

The same register gives this household at Cadden: a son Robert christened on 3 November 1541, with Harry as father; a son John buried on 24 September 1544, and another John christened on 18 January 1545/46; Johane, wife of Harrye, buried on 8 May 1547; Ellen’s marriage to John Tygon on 16 February 1548/49; Johane’s marriage to Robert Whiker (written Whicker in the register) of Sydmothe on 23 November 1550; and Edythe, a daughter, buried on 16 November 1552. The christenings of 1541 and 1546 name the father as Harry of Cadden, so the children of those years belong to this household, not to a second Harry of the name. Whether Johane, buried in 1547, was Agnes’s mother is not shown.

The 1524 subsidy

The Colyton Hundred subsidy of 1524, in the GENUKI transcription, lists “Henry Vye G 10” as assessed on goods, beside “John Vye G 10”. The list has no parish headings and states no kinship. Whether this Henry is the Harry of this page rests on the name and the hundred alone, and the records do not settle it.

The will of 1558

The testator left bequests to his sons Harry (who also had “my best gowne”), Robert, Edmond and John, each at the age of 21, and to his daughters Alice and Elizabeth at their marriages. He left the rest of his goods to Peter Lant, Harry Chamon, John Michell and Robert Whiker, and made them his executors. Agnes, Ellen and Johane had married by then, and none is named; Edythe, buried in 1552, had died before the will was made. The John Michell among the executors shows a tie between the two families but gives no kinship. Wills of Colyton people were normally proved in the Dean and Chapter of Exeter’s own court, whose records were largely destroyed in 1942; this will was proved in London, and its copy survives there.

The line of descent

John Insley Coddington, in his account of the Michell family in The American Genealogist (1939), wrote that the mother of John Michell (buried 1620) “may, or may not, have been” Agnes Vye, a daughter of Harry Vye of Cadhayne, and called the whole Michell pedigree tentative. The 1539 entry now names Harry as Agnes’s father. The doubt lies one step lower: Agnes’s husband was the man called “John Mychell the younger” in later entries, and his son John married at Colyton in 1569 as the son of “John the younger”, but no entry names that son’s mother. A widow Agnes Mychell of Rawkerhayne was buried at Colyton on 12 March 1564/65.

The name

The register writes the hamlet “Caddhayne” in 1539; later entries spell it several ways, among them Cadhayne, the form Coddington uses.