Alice Owen

Alice Owen ( Wilkes; 1547 – 26 October 1613) was an English philanthropist. Life Owen was born in 1547 to an Islington landowner Thomas Wilkes and his wife. She had a sister Mary whose daughter, Anne Bedingfeild, was also a benefactor. In her childhood, when in the fields at Islington, 'sporting with other children', she had a narrow escape of being killed by an arrow, shot by some unlucky archer, which 'pierced quite thorough the hat on her head'. For this providential escape, she recorded her gratitude in later life by the erection of a school and almshouses on the spot. The story appeared in this form within five years of her death, in the second edition of John Stow's 'Surray', published in 1618. Later on it received many embellishments. Alice Wilkes was three times married: firstly to Henry Robinson, a member of the Brewers' Company, by whom she had six sons and five daughters; secondly to William Elkin, an alderman of London, by whom she had one daughter, Ursula, married to Sir Roger Owen (son of Thomas, and her stepson) of Condover, Shropshire ; and thirdly to the judge Thomas Owen. It is as the widow of Mr. Justice Owen that she is often styled Dame Alice Owen, or even Lady Owen; but Owen was never knighted.