Richard Thomas Leazing

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Thomas Leazing (1590–1651), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Hampstead, parentage, marriage to Joan Lowe, his daughter Joan, his death in St Martins Parish, London, and the early-Stuart English era context. Notable: pre-colonial English ancestor whose descendants would emigrate to the American colonies.

Richard Thomas Leazing (1590–1651) stood among the earliest documented forebears of the Hyten line, his life unfolding entirely within the bounds of early-modern England. He was born in 1590 in Hampstead, Middlesex, then a rural parish on the wooded heights north of London, to Robert Leazing — whose surname also appears in the records under the variant spelling Lesson — and Ann Hill, who died in 1603 when Richard was a boy of about thirteen. The orthographic instability of his family name, drifting between Leazing, Lesson, Leasing, and similar forms, was wholly characteristic of an era in which English spelling had not yet been standardized and parish clerks recorded names by ear.

Richard came of age in the reign of Elizabeth I and lived through the whole of the Jacobean period and into the troubled years of Charles I. His adult life would have been shaped by the great religious and political upheavals of seventeenth-century England, culminating in the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the execution of the king in 1649 — events that convulsed London in the very years preceding his own death.

He married Joan Lowe, and from this union came a daughter, Joan (also recorded as Joane or Jone) Leazing, born in 1610 and surviving until 1674. Through this daughter the Leazing blood would carry forward into later generations and ultimately, by way of emigration, into the American branches of the family preserved in this archive.

Richard Thomas Leazing died in 1651 in St Martins Parish, London, in the second year of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. He thus belonged wholly to the Old World, his descendants the bridge by which the family name passed into the New.

Richard was the compiler's 12× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.