Penticoste Easely (Follet)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Penticoste Easely (Follet) (b. abt. 1550, d. unknown), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Broomfield, Essex, marriage to Frauncis Follit, her daughter Abigail Follett, and the Elizabethan English context of her life. Notable: deep-rooted Essex, England ancestry from the late Tudor period.

Penticoste Easely was born about the year 1550 in Broomfield, a village in the county of Essex, England, and she died at an unrecorded date in the city of London. She bore the distinctive given name Penticoste — a name occasionally bestowed in late Tudor England upon daughters born near the feast of Pentecost, and one which marked the religious sensibilities of the age in which she lived. Of her parents and the particulars of her early years no record has come down through the generations of the family.

The Essex of her birth was a settled and agriculturally prosperous corner of Elizabethan England, lying north and east of London and dotted with the parish churches and market villages that gave structure to country life. Broomfield, a small parish near Chelmsford, was such a community. During the long reign of Elizabeth I, families of the middling sort in Essex maintained close ties to the capital, and London frequently drew Essex-born men and women into its orbit for trade, service, or marriage — a movement which would in time bring Penticoste herself to end her days in that city.

She was joined in marriage to Frauncis Follit, and by him became the mother of at least one daughter recorded in the family's records: Abigail Follett, who died in the year 1610. Through this daughter the Follett line was carried forward across the generations, eventually crossing the Atlantic and joining, by long descent, with the American forebears of the Hyten family.

Though the dates of Penticoste's death and the particulars of her later life remain unknown, her place in the family's reckoning is secure. Penticoste Easely (Follet) stood as a twelfth great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandmother line, and remains among the most distant of the family's documented English ancestors.