John Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Cox (1605–1690), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth, parentage, marriage, sole recorded child, and the broader context of life in early-seventeenth-century Sussex, England. Notable: an early English ancestor whose entire life unfolded in the village of Lindfield, Sussex, spanning the reigns of four monarchs and the English Civil War.

John Cox (1605–1690) was born on the 24th of March, 1605, in the village of Lindfield, Sussex, in the south of England, and there, some eighty-five years later, on the 29th of July, 1690, he died. His was a life spent wholly within the bounds of a single Wealden parish — an unusual constancy even for his age, and one that bound the family name closely to the Sussex countryside for generations to come.

He was the son of Thomas Cox, who died in 1620 when John was but fifteen years of age, and of Joan Payne, who followed her husband to the grave five years later in 1625. John was thus left orphaned as a young man on the threshold of his own household — a not uncommon fate in an era when plague, harvest failure, and the ordinary perils of early modern life often cut parents short of their children's maturity. The Sussex of his boyhood was a county of yeomen farmers, ironworks in the Weald, and a steady Puritan-leaning piety that would shortly find its full expression in the upheavals of the 1640s.

John married Mary Sicklemore, and from this union came at least one recorded son, John Scott Lynn Cox, born in 1625 and living until 1700, who carried the family line forward into the next generation.

The span of John's lifetime was a remarkable one in English history. Born during the reign of James I, he lived through the Civil Wars and the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth under Cromwell, the Restoration of Charles II, and at last the Glorious Revolution of 1688 — dying two years into the joint reign of William and Mary. Through all these convulsions he kept to Lindfield, where the family endured.

John Cox stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 12× great-grandparent.