Thomas Trewhells Hicks

Thomas Trewhells Hicks (1480–1565) stands among the most distant forebears preserved in the Hyten family record, positioned as a sixteen-times great-grandfather of the compiler along the paternal-grandfather line. He was born on the 17th of March, 1480, in Tortworth, within the Stroud District of Gloucestershire, England, and there, in the same parish of his nativity, he died on the 25th of March, 1565, having attained the considerable age of eighty-five years — a remarkable span for one whose entire life unfolded across the turbulent reigns of the late Plantagenets and the early Tudors.

The England of Thomas's lifetime was a kingdom in profound transformation. He was born only five years before the close of the Wars of the Roses at Bosworth Field, lived through the long reign of Henry VII, witnessed the religious upheavals of Henry VIII and the English Reformation, saw the brief Protestant settlement under Edward VI, the Catholic restoration under Mary I, and at last the early years of Elizabeth I. Gloucestershire in this period was a county of prosperous wool towns, ancient parishes, and gentry families whose fortunes rose and fell with the new order. Tortworth itself lay in the Vale of Berkeley, a region long settled and intimately bound to the wool and cloth trades that underpinned much of west-country wealth.

Of Thomas's marriage the present record is silent, yet the line he founded was to attain considerable distinction in the generations following. His son, Sir Robert Hicks, would in time be associated with the Earldom of Gainsborough, lifting the family name into the higher ranks of English society and securing for the Hicks lineage a place in the heraldic and titled history of the realm.

Thomas Trewhells Hicks was, in the compiler's ancestry, a sixteen-times great-grandfather upon the paternal-paternal branch, and the earliest English progenitor of this distinguished Gloucestershire line preserved within these pages.