John Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Cox (1533–1587), a 14× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death at Lindfield in Sussex, England, his parentage, marriage to Agnes Carles, and his son Thomas. Notable: deep Tudor-era English roots reaching into the reign of Elizabeth I.

John Cox (1533–1587) was born in the parish of Lindfield, in the county of Sussex, England, and there he passed his entire recorded life, dying in that same village on the 27th of February, 1587. His parents were John Cox and Elizabeth Ferral, sometimes rendered Ferall in the older registers, and from them he received both his name and his place within the small Sussex community in which generations of his kin were settled.

The Lindfield of John's lifetime lay within the Weald of Sussex, a region of long-established parishes, ironworking, and modest market trade. The years between his birth in 1533 and his death in 1587 spanned a remarkable and turbulent passage of English history: the latter reign of Henry VIII, the brief rule of Edward VI, the Marian restoration, and the long Elizabethan settlement under which he died. Parish registers of the kind in which his name survives were themselves an innovation of this period, ordered by Thomas Cromwell in 1538, and it is to this Tudor record-keeping that the family owes much of what is now known of him.

John married Agnes Carles, also recorded under the given name Elizabeth, as was not uncommon when a woman bore both a baptismal and a familiar name in the registers of the day. Of the children of their union, the family record preserves Thomas Cox, who survived his father by more than three decades and died in 1620, carrying the Cox line forward into the seventeenth century.

Though the particulars of John's occupation, holdings, and station are not preserved in this archive, his place is firmly fixed by parish and lineage. He stands among the deepest English roots traced in these pages, and through his son Thomas the line descended in unbroken succession across the generations.

John Cox was the compiler's fourteen-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.