John Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Cox (1605–1690), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Lindfield, Sussex, England, his marriage to Mary Sicklemore, his son John Scott Lynn Cox, and the broader context of life in early seventeenth-century Sussex.

John Cox (1605–1690) stood among the earliest English forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, an 11× great-grandparent whose entire life was spent within the rolling Wealden parish of Lindfield, Sussex. Born there on the 24th of March, 1605, in the closing years of King James I's accession, he came into a small market village whose half-timbered houses and parish church of St. John the Baptist already counted centuries of habitation. He died in the same village on the 29th of July, 1690, having reached the venerable age of eighty-five — a remarkable span for an Englishman of his century, when plague, civil unrest, and harvest failure carried away many of his contemporaries.

The arc of John Cox's life encompassed some of the most turbulent decades in English history. He was a young man during the reign of Charles I, of mature years during the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and an old man by the time of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Sussex in this period was a county of yeomen, ironworkers, and clothiers, its Wealden forests still supplying timber and charcoal to the dwindling iron industry; Lindfield itself sat astride the old road from London to Brighton and supported a steady population of farming and trading families.

John was united in marriage to Mary Sicklemore, whose own roots lay in the same English country. Of their issue, the records preserve the name of a son, John Scott Lynn Cox (1625–1700), through whom the line descends to the compiler. That this son was born when his father was but twenty marks the beginning of the Cox generation that would, in time, carry the family name across the Atlantic to the American colonies.

John Cox was the compiler's 11× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.