Richard Leazing

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Leazing (b. abt. 1532, England), a 14× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, his place in the family's deep English roots, his sole recorded son Robert Leazing/Lesson, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: among the earliest documented forebears in the Hyten family record.

Richard Leazing, born about the year 1532 in the parish of Gedling, in the county of Nottinghamshire, England, stands among the most distant identifiable forebears recorded in the Hyten family archive. The particulars of his death — its date and precise place — have not been preserved, though the record affirms that his life closed within the bounds of his native England. He left behind a son, Robert Leazing, whose surname in subsequent generations came at times to be rendered as Lesson, a variation reflecting the fluid orthography common to English parish registers of the period.

Richard's lifetime unfolded against the dramatic backdrop of Tudor England. To be born about 1532 was to enter the world in the very year that King Henry VIII's break with Rome was approaching its decisive turn, and to come of age during the religious upheavals that followed under Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Nottinghamshire in the sixteenth century was a county of rolling agricultural land, small market towns, and ancient parishes whose registers — newly mandated under Thomas Cromwell's directive of 1538 — were only beginning to capture the lives of ordinary families in written form. Gedling itself, lying a short distance east of the town of Nottingham, was an old village with a medieval parish church, its inhabitants chiefly engaged in the rhythms of farming and parish life.

Though no occupation, station, or further biographical detail attaches to Richard's name in the surviving record, his appearance in the family register attests to a continuity of English ancestry stretching back nearly five centuries before the compiler's own day. From his son Robert, the line would carry forward through generations whose descendants eventually departed England altogether, joining the broader migration of English families to the New World.

Richard Leazing was the compiler's fourteenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.