HALL, Thomas I (by 1475-1511/19), of Ipswich, Suff.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. by 1475, prob. yr. s. of Thomas Hall of Coggeshall, Essex. m. Elizabeth, ?da. of one Fairfax, 1s.2

Offices Held

Common clerk, Ipswich 1496-7, common clerk and clerk of peace 1498-9, 1506-8, member of the Twenty-Four by 1509; comptroller of customs, port of Ipswich 1509.3

Biography

Thomas Hall was probably the younger son of an Essex mercer who owned property in Ipswich and whose own father was buried there. Apart from his town offices little has been discovered about Hall. His clerkships suggest a legal training, but his name does not appear on the registers of a university or inn of court. The Ipswich court book for 1509 refers to his delivery into the keeping of the town, on 26 Mar., of the standard weights and measures—‘a bushel and a yard and a gallon of brass, newly by him received out of the King’s Treasury’. The date is puzzling, since in the previous September he had been replaced as clerk of the crown and the peace by William Butler, while his patent as comptroller of customs is dated 20 Oct. 1509. However, William Spencer, a previous holder of the office and Hall’s fellow-Member for Ipswich in 1510, had apparently relinquished the comptrollership in 1506, and Hall may have been exercising the office before the enrolment of his patent. Between 1504 and 1509 he several times stood security for the proper discharge of their duties by sheriffs and escheators of Norfolk and Suffolk.4

In November 1510 Hall was disfranchised ‘for diverse disobediences and contempts’, and in the following January he was sent to the Fleet for alleging that Catherine of Aragon was ‘delivered of a knave child’. These happenings would explain his disappearance from public life in Ipswich after 1510. It is possible that he entered Wolsey’s service, although a Yorkshire namesake is more likely to have been the man instructed in February 1513 to oversee the audit of ecclesiastical property in that county belonging to Wolsey as dean of York. It was presumably this namesake who later the same year, as Wolsey’s servant, acknowledged the receipt of £1,000 from Lady Margaret Pole as part payment of her benevolence for the King’s wars. Hall was dead by December 1519, when his wife Elizabeth and son Thomas—probably the later clerk of the hanaper—were described as administrators of his property.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: John Pound

Notes

  • 1. Ipswich ct. bk. 7, p. 196; N. Bacon, Annals Ipswich, , 181.
  • 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference. Vis. Suff. ed. Metcalfe, 193; LP Hen. VIII, iii.
  • 3. Bacon, 172-9; LP Hen. VIII, i; Ipswich ct. bk. 7, p. 101.
  • 4. Ipswich ct. bk. 4, p. 510; PCC 5 Moone; LP Hen. VIII, i, iii; Bacon, 152-9, 180; CCR, 1500-9, p. 343.
  • 5. Bacon, 182 and n.; Lansd. 639, f. 38v; LP Hen. VIII, i, iii, iv.