Humphery Whittington

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Humphery Whittington (1554–1625), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Hungerford, parentage, death in Thatcham, his daughter Mary Ann, and Berkshire context during the late Tudor and early Stuart periods. Notable: an English forebear whose life spanned the reigns of Mary I, Elizabeth I, and James I.

Humphery Whittington (1554–1625) stands among the earliest English progenitors documented in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, a forebear whose long life bridged the latter half of the sixteenth century and the opening quarter of the seventeenth. He was born in 1554 at Hungerford, a market town in the county of Berkshire, England, and there entered a family of standing: his father was Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle, and his mother was Margery Nedham. The conjunction of these two houses placed Humphery within the gentry stratum of mid-Tudor England, a society then in the midst of profound religious and political reconfiguration under Queen Mary I and, soon after his birth, under the long reign of Elizabeth I.

Berkshire in this period was a county of chalk downland, prosperous market towns, and ancient ecclesiastical foundations, lying astride the road between London and the West Country. Hungerford itself had long been associated with the duchy of Lancaster and possessed customary rights of common that distinguished it from many neighboring towns. The Berkshire of Humphery's youth was a settled agricultural landscape recovering from the upheavals of the English Reformation, and the Whittington family appears to have remained rooted within its bounds across the whole of his lifetime.

Humphery is recorded as the father of Mary Ann Whittington, who died in 1650 and through whom the line descended toward the compiler's own ancestry. Whether he had additional issue is not preserved in the present record, but the survival of Mary Ann's name and dates secures the genealogical bridge across the generation.

He died in 1625 at Thatcham, also in Berkshire, only a short distance from his birthplace, in the same year that King James I died and Charles I came to the throne — a moment poised on the edge of the great constitutional struggles that would soon convulse England. Humphery was the compiler's twelfth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.