Thomas Paine

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Paine (c. 1513–1573), a fifteenth great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death at Westhill in Ardingly, Sussex, England, his marriage to Jone Bartone, his son Richard Paine, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: deep English Tudor-period roots of the Paine/Payne line.

Thomas Paine, born about the year 1513 and departing this life on the twenty-ninth of March, 1573, passed the whole of his known days at Westhill in the parish of Ardingly, in the county of Sussex, England. He stands among the most distant forebears whose names have been preserved in this register, and his life unfolded across the turbulent middle decades of the sixteenth century.

The Sussex of Thomas Paine's lifetime was a county of small villages, ancient parishes, and gently wooded weald, where the slow rhythms of agriculture and the rising hum of the iron trade alike shaped daily life. Born in the closing years of Henry VII's settled reign and living through the long sovereignty of Henry VIII, the brief reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and into the first fifteen years of Elizabeth I, he witnessed — at least from the perspective of a Sussex parishioner — the great religious upheavals that transformed the English church. Ardingly itself was an old Wealden parish, recorded in the Domesday Book, and Westhill lay among its scattered farmsteads.

Thomas was joined in marriage to Jone Bartone, a union which produced at least one son whose line has been traced forward into the present family. That son, Richard Paine — whose surname in later generations also appears in the form Payne — survived his father by some sixty-five years, dying in 1638, and it is through Richard that the Paine descent continues into the compiler's pedigree.

Of Thomas Paine's particular trade, station, or temperament the record is silent, as is so often the case with English yeomen and tradesmen of his century, whose names survive chiefly through parish registers and probate. That he lived and died in the same Sussex locality suggests rootedness in the soil of Ardingly across a full lifespan of some sixty years.

Thomas Paine was the compiler's fifteenth great-grandfather along the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.