Richard Paine (Payne)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Paine (also rendered Payne) (circa 1540–circa 1638), a 14× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English origins in Sussex, his parentage, marriage to Katherine Balcombe, his daughter Joan, and Elizabethan-era context. Notable: a deep Tudor-Stuart English ancestor of remarkable longevity, bridging the reigns of Henry VIII through Charles I.

Richard Paine, whose surname is variously rendered Payne in the older registers, was born about the year 1540 at Westhill in the parish of Ardingly, in the county of Sussex, England, and died about 1638 at East Lydford, having attained — if the dates are correctly preserved — the venerable age of nearly a century. He was the son of Thomas Paine and Jone Bartone, and stood in that long line of Sussex yeomanry whose roots reached back into the medieval Weald.

The England of Richard's birth was a kingdom in profound transition. Henry VIII still sat upon the throne; the dissolution of the monasteries was lately accomplished, and the religious settlements that would unsettle the parishes of Sussex for generations were only beginning to take shape. The Ardingly of his boyhood was a country of small farms, ironworks, and ancient hedgerows, lying in the Sussex Weald some thirty miles south of London. Over the course of his lifetime, Richard would have witnessed the accession of Edward VI, the Marian restoration, the long Elizabethan settlement, the union of crowns under James I, and the troubled early reign of Charles I — an extraordinary span of English history compressed within a single life.

Richard was united in marriage to Katherine Balcombe, whose surname likewise belongs to the Sussex country, taken from the neighboring village of Balcombe a short distance from Ardingly. Of their issue, the family record preserves the name of a daughter, Joan Payne, who died in 1625, predeceasing her long-lived father by more than a decade.

The close of Richard's life found him at East Lydford, in Somerset, well removed from the Sussex parish of his birth — a westward removal whose particular occasion is no longer recoverable from the family papers.

Richard Paine was a fourteen-times great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.