Gilbert Hicks

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Gilbert Hicks (1520–1570), a 14× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Stapleford, Wiltshire, England; his noble parentage; his marriage to Dianne Atwood; his son Gilbert Hix II; and Tudor-era English context. Notable: descent from Sir Robert Hicks, Earl of Gainsborough.

Gilbert Hicks (1520–1570) stands among the earliest English forebears recorded in the Hyten family register, his life unfolding entirely within the parish of Stapleford in Wiltshire, where he was born on the 3rd of May, 1520, and where he died on the 17th of October, 1570, at the age of fifty. His half-century of life spanned one of the most turbulent epochs in English history, encompassing the later reign of Henry VIII, the brief reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, and the first dozen years of Elizabeth I — an age in which Wiltshire's gentry families navigated the religious upheavals of the English Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the gradual settlement of the Elizabeth­an Church.

He was the son of Sir Robert Hicks, styled Earl of Gainsborough, and his wife Mildred — known also as Mary — Scott, a parentage that placed Gilbert within the ranks of the landed English gentry. The rural Wiltshire of his lifetime was a country of chalk downs, sheep walks, and ancient parish churches, and Stapleford itself lay along the River Till, near Salisbury, in a region long shaped by agriculture and the wool trade that had enriched many a West-Country family.

Gilbert married Dianne Atwood, and from that union came at least one recorded son, Gilbert Hix II, through whom the family line would carry forward across generations and, in time, across the Atlantic to the American colonies. The variant rendering of the surname — Hicks giving way in the next generation to Hix — reflects the fluidity of English spelling in this period, when names were set down phonetically by parish clerks and orthography had yet to harden into modern fixity.

Gilbert Hicks was the compiler's 14× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.