Robert Leazing\Lesson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Robert Leazing (also rendered Lesson) (1550–1595), a 13× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his London birth, parentage, marriage to Ann Hill, his son Richard Thomas, his death in Nottinghamshire, and Elizabethan-era English context. Notable: among the earliest English ancestors documented in the archive.

Robert Leazing — whose surname is rendered in surviving records under the variant spellings Leazing and Lesson — was born on the 14th of July, 1550, in St Martins Parish, London, England, and died in the year 1595 at Gedling in the county of Nottinghamshire. His life thus unfolded entirely within the long Elizabethan age, a period in which England moved from the religious turbulence of the mid-Tudor years toward the cultural and maritime flowering of the late sixteenth century. Born in the parish life of London and laid to rest in the Midlands countryside, Robert's recorded geography traces a path not uncommon among Englishmen of his generation, who moved between the capital and the provincial shires as opportunity and family ties required.

He was a son of Richard Leazing, and in due course took to wife Ann Hill, with whom his lineage continued. Of that union the family archive preserves the name of one son, Richard Thomas Leazing, who survived into the following century and died in 1651. Through this Richard Thomas the Leazing line carried forward across the upheavals of the English Civil War years and ultimately, by paths traced in later entries of this register, into the ancestry of the compiler.

Nottinghamshire in Robert's day was a county of market towns, agricultural villages, and parish churches whose registers — only newly required by royal injunction in the years of his youth — would become the very instruments by which his life is now known. Gedling, the place of his death, lay within the rural hinterland east of the town of Nottingham, and it is there that the close of his earthly course was set down.

Robert Leazing stands among the earliest English forebears recorded in this archive. He was the compiler's thirteenth-great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.