Andrewe KNIGHT

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Andrewe Knight (b. 1532, death year unknown), a 13× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Timsbury, Hampshire, England, his death in Hampshire, his son John Knight, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: deep English ancestry preceding the family's eventual migration to the American colonies.

Andrewe Knight, born in 1532 in the parish of Timsbury in the county of Hampshire, England, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. The precise date of his death has not been preserved, but he is recorded as having ended his days within his native Hampshire, suggesting a life rooted in the rolling chalk downs and small agricultural parishes of that southern English shire.

Hampshire in the sixteenth century was a county of mixed husbandry, market towns, and ancient ecclesiastical seats, lying between the cathedral city of Winchester and the rising naval port of Portsmouth. Andrewe's lifetime spanned an era of profound upheaval in English religious and civil affairs: he was born in the closing years of Henry VIII's reign, came of age during the brief reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, and would have lived through much of the long Elizabethan settlement. The Knights of Timsbury, like most yeoman and laboring families of that age, would have witnessed at parish level the shifting of altars, the issuance of new prayer books, and the gradual fixing of the parish register system that has permitted his very name to descend to us.

Of Andrewe's marriage no record has here been entered, though the line continued through his son John Knight, who survived until 1630 and carried the family forward into the Stuart era and the generation that would see the first English settlements take root across the Atlantic.

Although the documentary trail surrounding Andrewe is necessarily thin — as is so often the case with English ancestors of the early Tudor period, whose lives are glimpsed chiefly through parish entries and the names of their children — his place in the pedigree is secure. Andrewe Knight was the compiler's 13× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, an English progenitor from whom many subsequent generations of the Knight family, and ultimately the Hyten descendants, would trace their lineage.