HANFORD, Hugh

Hanford’s origins and early life are obscure, but he evidently trained in the law, and by the 1460s had gained admission to Gray’s Inn. His services were drawn upon by a variety of citizens of London, including the draper, Thomas Batter, who was embroiled in a dispute over copper and tin worth £160,2 C1/27/423. and William Walsh, brother and heir of the clothworker Nicholas Walsh, who employed Hanford as one of his feoffees of property originally assigned to the house of the Minoresses outside Aldgate for the maintenance of an obit.3 CIMisc. viii. 386. One of Hanford’s co-feoffees was the bell-founder William Wolston, with whom he possessed a prior connexion: in the autumn of 1464 Wolston had acknowledged before the justices of common pleas his liability for a debt of £39 13s. 4d. owing to the lawyer.4 CP40/813, rot. 328d. Another of Hanford’s lesser clients was the Westminster yeoman John Tebbe, for whom he found surety in the Middlesex county court in 1465,5 E13/151, rot. 98d; KB27/818, rex rots. 6, 6d. but it is clear that he also possessed some important connexions: in April 1465 he acted as a mainpernor for Thomas St. Leger†, who was granted the royal manor of Kennington in Surrey.6 CPR, 1461-7, p. 435. By contrast, it is not clear whether he was in any way connected with John Mowbray (d.1461), duke of Norfolk, the lord of the borough that returned him to the Commons in 1460.