Sir, Thomas Whittington Moyle

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle (1520–1580), a 13× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, his parentage, his marriage to Margery Nedham, and his son Humphery. Notable: knighted Tudor-era English forebear, the earliest fully dated ancestor in this branch.

Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle (1520–1580) stands among the earliest fully dated ancestors recorded in the paternal-grandfather line of the Hyten family register. Born in 1520 in the parish of Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, England, he passed from this life in the same parish in 1580, having spent the whole of his sixty years within the green hedgerows and ancient stone lanes of that midland county. His title of knighthood, preserved in the family record, marks him as a man of standing in Tudor England.

He was the son of Robert Withington Whittington and Mary Hyett, the latter surname bearing an evident kinship to the Hyett, Hyte, and ultimately Hyten lineage which the compiler descends from and which gives this archive its name. Thomas's lifetime spanned an extraordinary chapter in English history: he was a boy of some thirteen years when King Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1533, a young man during the religious turbulence of Edward VI and Mary I, and a settled gentleman through the long Elizabethan ascendancy that began in 1558. Warwickshire in this period remained largely agricultural, its country gentry bound to the land and to the parish church, and its great houses entangled in the political and ecclesiastical contests of the Tudor court.

Sir Thomas married Margery Nedham, and from their union the line continued through their son Humphery Whittington, who survived his father by some forty-five years and died in 1625, in the reign of King James I. Through Humphery the Whittington blood was carried forward across the generations that would, in time, cross the Atlantic and merge with the families gathered in this register.

Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle was the compiler's thirteenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.