Richard Edward Freshwater

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Edward Freshwater (1567–1605), an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in London, his marriage to Bridget Brand, his son Edwardi Freshwater, his death in England, and Elizabethan-Jacobean era context. Notable: among the earliest English-born ancestors recorded in this register.

Richard Edward Freshwater (1567–1605) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, an eleven-times great-grandfather whose life unfolded entirely within the bounds of Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. He was born on the 26th of November, 1567, in London, a city then emerging as one of the great commercial and cultural capitals of Europe under the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The London of Richard's birth was a place of perhaps one hundred thousand souls, walled in part, ringed by parishes and market gardens, and animated by the river traffic of the Thames; in the years of his youth and early manhood, the city would witness the flowering of the English Renaissance, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the construction of the great public playhouses on the south bank.

In the course of his life Richard married Bridget Brand, and of that union the family register preserves the name of at least one son, Edwardi Freshwater, born in 1603 and surviving his father to live until 1660. The boy was therefore only an infant of perhaps a year or two at the time of his father's death, a circumstance not uncommon in an age when life expectancy, even among those who reached adulthood, was sharply curtailed by recurrent epidemics and the ordinary hazards of the period.

Richard Edward Freshwater died on the 17th of February, 1605, in England, his passing falling within the opening years of the reign of King James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth in 1603. The specific circumstances of his death are not recorded in the family register, and the dignity of silence is here preserved.

Richard was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and through his son Edwardi the Freshwater name was carried forward into the generations that would, in time, contribute to the family inscribed in this archive.