Frauncis Follit

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Frauncis Follit (1546–1623), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth in Somerset, his death in London, his marriage to Penticoste Easely, and his daughter Abigail. Notable: an Elizabethan- and early Jacobean-era English forebear whose descendants would eventually contribute to the family's North American line.

Frauncis Follit, born in the year 1546 at Broomfield in the county of Somerset, England, stands among the earliest forebears traceable in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, occupying the place of a twelfth great-grandparent. His birth in the heart of the West Country placed him within the rural English landscape of small parishes and ancient market towns, in an England newly Protestant under the young King Edward VI and on the eve of the long Elizabethan age that would shape the language, faith, and commerce of his lifetime.

He took to wife Penticoste Easely, whose given name — drawn from the feast of Pentecost — reflected the devotional naming customs common to English Protestant households of the latter sixteenth century. Of their union is recorded a daughter, Abigail Follett, who preceded her father in death in the year 1610, a sorrow not uncommon in an age when even adult children frequently died before their parents owing to the perils of childbirth, recurring plague, and the ordinary hazards of early modern life.

Frauncis lived through a remarkable span of English history: the short reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, the long settlement under Elizabeth I, and the union of the English and Scottish crowns under James I in 1603. By the time of his death in 1623, England had seen the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the flowering of the Elizabethan stage, the publication of the King James Bible, and the first permanent English settlements upon the shores of North America at Jamestown and Plymouth — currents that would, in the fullness of generations, draw his own descendants across the Atlantic.

He died in London in 1623, having removed, at some point, from the Somerset countryside of his birth to the great capital of the realm. Frauncis was the compiler's twelfth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.