♂John Mervyn

John Mervyn (about 1480 – 1533) was a yeoman of Ramsey in Essex, England, a man of considerable wealth with houses and land in Ramsey, Great Oakley and Little Oakley and a quarter share in the ship Mary and John. He was the twelfth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Reinold Marvin (born about 1513).

Family

John was the son of Thomas Mervyn of Ramsey, a man of substance who died in 1503 or 1504. He was probably born about 1480, and he was of age by 1503, when he and Christian, his father’s widow, were named executors of his father’s will. He married a woman named Margaret, whose maiden name no record gives. They had eight children: five sons, John, Reinold, Thomas, Richard and John the younger, and three daughters, Margaret, Christian and Marion. Two of the sons were named John, and the will told them apart as the eldest and “the younger.” In 1533 the eldest John was of age, while Reinold, Thomas and Richard were still under twenty-one.

His will

John made his will on 16 September 1533. He asked to be buried in the Church of St Michael the Archangel at Ramsey, near his father, and left 3s. 4d. to that church and 12d. to “the old work of St. Paul’s,” the fabric of St Paul’s Cathedral^W in London. An honest priest was to sing for him and his friends in Ramsey church for half a year, at a fee of £3 6s. 8d., and the four orders of friars^W in and about Ipswich received 40s. His land called Janecoxe went to his feoffees^W to keep an obit, a yearly service of remembrance, for him, his father and all his friends. He also left £4 to the amending of Ramsey highway and bridge.

To his wife Margaret he left all his houses and lands in Ramsey, copyhold^W and freehold, with the household stuff, £20, ten milch beasts, two couple of oxen, four cart horses with their harness, cart and plow, and a hundred sheep. Most of the land was to pass to the sons only after her death. The eldest John was to have the house the family lived in, the copyhold land held of the Abbot of St Osyth^W and a pightle called Waxe, and he took the quarter of the Mary and John at once. Reinold was to have the tenement called Bennettes, and Thomas the tenement called Rolfes with the Nether lands and Gesses. Richard received Brandons in Little Oakley, and John the younger a tenement called Milkes in Great Oakley. Reinold, Thomas and Richard were each to have £10 at twenty-one, and each daughter £10 on her marriage.

His brother Thomas Mervyn, who lived at Harwich, received £5, a “garthing plate” in Harwich that had been their father’s, and all John’s bows and shafts, and was named supervisor of the will. Margaret and the eldest John were the executors, and his servants and some sixteen other men were left sheep and clothes. He died that autumn and was buried at St Michael’s, and on 17 December 1533 Margaret and the eldest John proved the will in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W.

Notes

Sources

The will is known from a full transcript of the copy registered in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and John Insley Coddington printed an abstract of it in “Notes on the Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin,” The American Genealogist 18 (1941), pages 3 to 5. Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), pages 712 and 713, follow it. The birth year is Coddington’s estimate, from John’s being of age and an executor in 1503. He died between the making of the will on 16 September and its probate on 17 December 1533; both studies say he was buried at St Michael’s at Ramsey.

Parentage

Coddington identifies this John with the son named co-executor in the will of Thomas Merveyn of Ramsey, made on 23 August 1503 and proved on 11 April 1504. Whether Thomas’s widow, Christian, was John’s mother is uncertain. Coddington thought it impossible to judge from the will; the 1952 study thinks it probable, since she was an executor with John and John named a daughter Christian. William T. R. Marvin’s The English Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin (1900) did not know John’s name and made him a grandson of Roger Mervyn of Ipswich; Coddington showed that descent to be wrong.

The children

The will names the eight children; their order is uncertain. Coddington estimates that the eldest John was born about 1510 and Reinold about 1513, and he judged from the will that Margaret was the mother of all of them. The will of John’s brother Robert, made on 10 December 1556, left twenty shillings apiece to his “godsons” Raynold and John Marven, whom Coddington’s abstract calls the sons of his brother John.