John Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Cox (1605–1690), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth, death, parish of Lindfield in Sussex, his son John Scott Lynn Cox, and the broader context of early seventeenth-century English village life under the Stuart monarchs and Civil War era.

John Cox (1605–1690) was born on the twenty-fourth day of March in the year 1605 in the parish of Lindfield, in the county of Sussex, England, and there he passed his entire long life of eighty-five years, dying in that same village on the twenty-ninth of July, 1690. His tenure upon the earth spanned one of the most turbulent centuries in English history, and yet the parish of his birth held him fast from cradle to grave — a circumstance not uncommon among the yeoman families of the Sussex Weald, whose roots in their home parishes often stretched back many generations.

Lindfield in the early seventeenth century was a settled rural community in the High Weald of Sussex, a region long associated with the iron industry, with sheep husbandry, and with the small farms and cottages of an established English peasantry and minor gentry. The parish church of All Saints, dating to medieval times, stood at the center of village life, and the customary rhythms of baptism, marriage, and burial recorded there formed the chronicle of families such as the Coxes.

During the course of John's lifetime, England endured the reigns of James I, Charles I, the upheavals of the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of Charles II, and at last the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which came just two years before John's death. Whether the affairs of crown and parliament reached deeply into the daily life of a Sussex villager is a matter the records do not disclose; the parish registers preserve only the essential milestones of his earthly passage.

Of John's marriage, the surviving records of this family archive are silent, but he was father to at least one son, John Scott Lynn Cox (1625–1700), through whom the line of descent has been preserved.

John Cox stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a twelve-times great-grandfather, one of the most remote English forebears whose name and dates the family chronicle has been able to recover.