The English ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin of Hartford, Ct ...

Foreword J
been photographed from Camden's Britannia, printed before our
ancestors sailed from England. A more elaborate map showing
the ancient highways in Tendring Hundred will be found in
Morant's Essex, and one on a smaller scale in the Post Office
Directory for that County ; both show the roads to which reference
is made on page 138 below.
The investigations which have been described above carry back
the line of our ancestors to the period when the Tudors ascended
the throne of England. As will be seen, the first of our direct
line of whom we have absolute knowledge, although his Christian
name is not certainly known [see pp. 31 and 38], must have been
born not far from 1485, the year of the Battle of Bosworth Field,
the last in the Wars of the Roses, — when the crown which Richard
III had tossed aside in his flight was taken from the hawthorn
bush into which it had fallen, and placed on the head of Henry
VII by Lord Derby. As Prof. Guest has said in his English His-
tory, " Old times were passing away and new ones were beginning.
This period was the end of the middle ages, and the death of the
feudal system .... a time of great spirit and stir, full of eager-
ness, and anticipation, and wonder." America was not yet dis-
covered. Caxton, the first of English printers, had recently set up
his press in Westminster Abbey. The contest between Henry
VIII and the Pope was yet to come, and the Clergy who ministered
at the altars of English Churches were under the Roman
obedience. It was the era of the Renaissance, — the sunrise hour
of Modern History ; and to me it seems a matter of something
more than ordinary interest that the story of our New England
family should chance to begin at this pivotal point.
A century and a half passed away, and the Stuarts were reigning
when Matthew, the first of our ancestors to cross the sea, left
England. The ship which carried him bore an auspicious name—
"The Increase." Charles I was already in trouble with his Par-