♂Thomas Mervyn

Thomas Mervyn (died 1503 or 1504) was a man of property at Ramsey in Essex, England, with houses at Harwich and a share of its quay, and the earliest known forefather of the Marvin brothers who settled in Connecticut in the 1630s. He was the thirteenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Mervyn (about 1480 – 1533).

His will

Nearly all that is known of him comes from his will. On 23 August 1503 he made it by word of mouth, before ten witnesses, among them the bailiff of Harwich. It was a nuncupative will^W, spoken aloud and set down in writing afterwards.

His will left his wife Christian half of his household goods and all the goods she had brought with her on their marriage, with his lands at the Churchgate of Ramsey to her and her heirs forever. His son John received the house at Bridge with its lands and the land at Kent in the Soken, his son Thomas the houses in Harwich, and his son Robert a trunk. His four daughters were left ten pounds. John Flecher was to have Thomas’s part of the quay at Harwich on paying forty shillings to the executors. He named his wife Christian, his son John and Thomas Gray as executors.

Death and burial

He probably died soon after making the will, and certainly before 11 April 1504, when it was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W. He was buried in the Church of St Michael the Archangel at Ramsey. Thirty years later his son John asked in his own will to be buried in that church “near my father”. John left his brother Thomas a “garthing plate” in Harwich “that was my father’s“, and gave land called Janecoxe to keep an obit, a yearly memorial service, “for me, my father and all my friends”.

Family

Thomas left three sons, John, Thomas and Robert, and four daughters, of whom only Ann is known by name. John, who was named an executor, was probably the eldest. The terms of the will do not show whether Christian was the mother of his children.

Notes

The will

The will is known from an abstract published by John Insley Coddington in The American Genealogist 18 (1941), p. 3, taken from the register of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (5 Holgrave), where the name is written Merveyn. It was proved on 11 April 1504 by John Wro, proctor to the executors. The ten witnesses were John Cuko, John Rande, Water Hunt, Reynold Edgar “bailly of Herwych”, George Hasketh, Thomas Doye, Lawrence Yong, William Pyerce, Emme White and John Perdryche. The abstract reads “To his four daughters, £10”, without saying whether that was the sum for each or for all four. Coddington calls Thomas “obviously a man of considerable substance”, and Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), p. 712, repeat the phrase. Both give his burial at St Michael the Archangel, Ramsey.

Parentage

His parents are not known. Coddington thought he “may by a bare possibility” have been a son of Robert Mervyn of Ipswich in Suffolk, since he named a son Robert, but stressed that “there is no proof at all of this identification”. William T. R. Marvin’s The English Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin (1900) had traced the family back to Roger Mervyn of Ipswich, who died in 1475, through a supposed son John who moved to Harwich or Ramsey. Marvin did not know the wills of 1503 and 1533, and Coddington, who found them, showed that the line ran instead from Thomas through his son John to Reinold of Ramsey and his son Edward of Great Bentley.

The children

The will names the three sons but not the daughters. Coddington gives the children’s order as unknown, takes John to be probably the eldest because he was an executor, and estimates the sons’ births at about 1480, 1485 and 1490. He identifies Ann, apparently the youngest, from the will of her brother Robert, made on 10 December 1556; she married Robert Borflete. The other three daughters were living in 1503 but are not named.