name and style of him. It may suffice, however, for the present,
that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and
grew to wealth and consequence in their new home.

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only
was William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in
1555, but no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century
and a half, a Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the
same place of humble honour. Of their wealth we know that in the
reign of Charles I., Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once
in the market buying land, and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor
of Stowting Court. This was an estate of some 320 acres, six miles
from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe
of Shipway, held of the Crown IN CAPITE by the service of six men
and a constable to defend the passage of the sea at Sandgate. It
had a chequered history before it fell into the hands of Thomas of
Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to another - to the
Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys, Trivets,
Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes: a
piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no
man's home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the
Jenkin family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to
brother, held in shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by
debts and jointures, and at least once sold and bought in again, it
remains to this day in the hands of the direct line. It is not my
design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to give a history of
this obscure family. But this is an age when genealogy has taken a
new lease of life, and become for the first time a human science;
so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to