Thomas Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Cox (1562–1620), a 13× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Lindfield, Sussex, England, his parentage, marriage to Joan Payne, and his son John. Notable: deep Elizabethan-Jacobean English Sussex roots predating the family's later transatlantic migration.

Thomas Cox was born on the twentieth of September, 1562, in the parish of Lindfield, in the Weald of Sussex, England, and died in that same village on the sixth of April, 1620, having passed his entire recorded life within its bounds. He was the son of John Cox and Agnes — also called Elizabeth — Carles, and through them was rooted in a region of southeastern England long marked by ironworking, weaving, and the steady rhythms of agricultural life.

The Sussex Weald of the latter sixteenth century into which Thomas was born was a landscape of small market parishes, ancient timber-framed houses, and chalk and clay fields. Lindfield itself was a well-established village whose stone parish church of St. John the Baptist would have figured prominently in the rites of birth, marriage, and burial that ordered village life. Thomas's lifetime spanned the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I — an era of religious settlement, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the flowering of English drama, and, near the close of his life, the first English ventures of permanent settlement upon the shores of North America.

Thomas Cox married Joan Payne, and from their union issued at least one recorded son, John Cox, born in 1605 and living until 1690 — a man whose own long life would carry the family forward into the turbulent decades of the English Civil War and the great Puritan migrations.

Thomas died in Lindfield in the spring of 1620, the very year in which the Mayflower carried English dissenters to the New World. He himself remained, so far as the record shows, a man of his native Sussex parish, dying in the ground that had received him at his christening fifty-seven years earlier.

Thomas Cox stood as a 13× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, an early English progenitor in the deep ancestry of the Hyten family.