Elizabeth Townes

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Townes (1589–1639), a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Devon, England; her mother Elizabeth Alice Clarke; her marriage to Gilbert E. Hicks; her son Richard Edward Hicks; and the context of late-Elizabethan and early Stuart rural England.

Elizabeth Townes (1589–1639) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, a woman of the West Country whose entire recorded life unfolded within the green parishes of Devon, England. She was born on the 7th of March, 1589, at Cookbury, a small agricultural parish in the rolling country of north Devon, and she died fifty years later, on the 14th of May, 1639, at Bridgerule, a neighboring parish set along the River Tamar at the Cornish border.

Her mother was Elizabeth Alice Clarke, who survived her daughter's early years and lived until 1630. The two Devon parishes that bracketed Elizabeth's life lay only a few miles apart, suggesting a life passed within the close-knit web of rural Anglican villages typical of the era — communities organized around the parish church, seasonal husbandry, and tightly woven kinship networks. The England into which she was born was that of the later years of Queen Elizabeth I; the England in which she died was on the eve of the Civil War that would shortly engulf the realm under Charles I. Devon itself, with its market towns and farming hamlets, would in that conflict prove a contested ground between Royalist and Parliamentary forces.

Elizabeth was married to Gilbert E. Hicks (also rendered Hix in surviving records), and from this union came a son, Richard Edward Hicks, born in 1617 and living until 1660. Through this son, the Hicks line would carry forward across generations and, in time, across the Atlantic, threading its way into the colonial branches that the Hyten family archive traces westward through the centuries.

Elizabeth Townes was a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.