HALL, Thomas (d.1675), of Donington, Lincs.

Hall belonged to a yeoman or minor gentry family that had settled at Donington, in south-east Lincolnshire, by the late Tudor period.21Lincs. Peds. 439-40. He was born at some point between his father’s second marriage late in 1606 and his death in 1615, whereupon Thomas and his elder half-brother were taken into the care of their grandfather, George Hall.22Ingoldsby par. reg. (mar. entry 11 Dec. 1606); Lincs. RO, LCC wills, W1615/267. The latter was apparently a man of godly convictions, expressing the hope (in his will) for salvation by Christ alone, ‘throwing my own righteousness behind my back, holding it as loathsome as the menstruous cloth’. He bequeathed Hall lands in ‘Sutton’ – probably Long Sutton, south of Boston – and stipulated that if the living of Donington fell vacant while Hall and his half-brother were still minors, then their uncle was to present ‘a godly and religious minister of sufficiency to preach the Word’. He made bequest totalling about £700, including a legacy of £100 to Thomas.23Lincs. RO, LCC wills, W1621/ii/217. The details of Hall’s education are obscure, and he failed to receive any significant local appointments before 1643, when he was still being referred to as a yeoman.24A Declaration of the Commons Assembled in Parliament upon Two Letters Sent by Sir John Brooks (1643), 11 (E.101.13).

Uncompromised by close links with Lincolnshire’s gentry governors, Hall emerged in the mid-1630s as a champion of the ‘commoners’ and landowners in the south east of the county in their dispute with the undertakers (a gentry-dominated consortium) for draining the Lindsey Level. In 1635, he petitioned the privy council on behalf of himself and his tenants at Donington, complaining that the undertakers had appropriated more land than they had been allotted.25CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 399. However, with the crown firmly on the side of the undertakers, Hall was driven to more desperate courses, and in the autumn of 1639 he was arrested by the privy council for having ‘disturbed’ the drainage works of the earl of Lindsey and other undertakers, although the council conceded that Hall had not acted ‘altogether in so riotous a manner’ as some of his confederates.26PC2/50, p. 693; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 106. He renewed his battle with the undertakers in the spring of 1640 – having helped to organise a petition from the commoners’ to the Short Parliament – but he and other ‘rioters’ were arraigned before the council and ‘forced to enter into bond not to disquiet the earl’s possession ... it being then a dangerous time to oppose prerogative power’.27PC2/52, pp. 477, 485; SP16/452/73, f. 181; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 76, 136; A Relation of the Proceedings and Causes of Complaint between the Undertakers with the Earle of Lindsey...and the Owners and Commoners There (1650), 9; A Breviate of the Cause Depending, and Proofes Made before the Committee of the Late Parliament for the Fens (1651), 6-7 (669 f.19.63); Lindley, Fenland Riots, 110.

Hall continued to defy the undertakers throughout the early 1640s. In August 1641, he petitioned the House of Lords, requesting that legislation intended to outlaw the commoners’ proceedings be postponed until they could prepare their case against it.28PA, Main Pprs. 5 Aug. 1641, f. 46; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 121-2. And in May 1642, a group of Lincolnshire magistrates complained that when they had approached Hall, ‘who had much power among the multitude’, to assist them in executing an order from the Lords for removing the commoners and their cattle from the undertakers’ lands, he had refused to help them on the grounds that the king had declared that no ordinance of Parliament was to be obeyed without his assent. The undertakers alleged that Hall and his confederates ‘destroy the public drains, burn and pull down houses, maim and wound many people ... and do march many hundreds in troops after captains in this rebellious manner’.29PA, Main Pprs. 23 May 1642, ff. 186-7.

Hall’s professed reverence for the king’s authority in the spring of 1642 was entirely bogus, for he sided with Parliament at the outbreak of civil war and was indicted for high treason by the royalists at the Grantham sessions in 1643.30Breviate, 12; A Declaration of the Commons, 11. He was probably the Captain Thomas Hall who served in the Lincolnshire parliamentarian forces during the mid-1640s – although if so, his military career was apparently unremarkable.31A. and O. i. 294; SP28/144, pt. 3, f. 9v. With the revival of the undertakers’ claims under the Rump, Hall re-emerged as a leading defender of the commoners’ rights in the east Lincolnshire fens.32W. Killigrew, The Earle of Lindsey His Title (1654). At a meeting at Donington in August 1649, Hall, Charles Hussey* and several other gentlemen drafted a letter to the undertakers, claiming that although their case had been ‘fully proved’ before the committee of the fens under the chairmanship of William Ellys*, nevertheless they were prepared to compromise provided they were given a share in the venture.33Certaine Papers Concerning the Earle of Lindsey His Fennes (1649), 2-3; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 161-2. Agreement proved impossible to reach however, and Hall’s continued agitation on behalf of the commoners may have been a factor in his removal from the Holland bench in 1652.34C231/6, p. 243.

The dispute over the Lindsey Level became a major issue in the Lincolnshire elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654. Hall’s return for one of the county’s ten seats (apparently in second place) was alleged to have owed much to his championship of the commoners’ rights – as one contemporary complained to the protectoral council

Thomas Hall of Donington is the common solicitor for those rioters of Lincolnshire and an opposer of all public works which are enriching of the nation. And for his factious humour it is conceived that he is now chosen knight of the shire, being a mean and inconsiderable person. Sir William Armyne* or John Hatcher [leading county gentlemen] are much fitter.35SP18/73/91, f. 223; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 279; Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’.

Hall may not have had the pedigree that traditionally went with electoral success in the county, but he and his neighbours were said to have grown ‘very rich’ by the mid-1650s through expropriating the undertakers’ lands.36Add. 21423, f. 193. Either Thomas or his fellow Lincolnshire MP Charles Hall (no relation) was added to the committee of privileges on 5 October, but that represented the sum total of both men’s appointments in this Parliament.37CJ vii. 373b.

Hall was re-elected for Lincolnshire to the second protectoral Parliament in 1656, and this time he took first place after comfortably beating many of the county’s parliamentarian grandees, as well as the republican statesman Sir Henry Vane II*, on a poll.38Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. He was one of the four Lincolnshire Members who were allowed to take their seats by the protectoral council; the remaining six were excluded as enemies of the government. On 22 September, he was among the 29 MPs who voted against a motion that the excluded Members apply to the council for approbation to sit, which was interpreted as support for ‘the bringing in of the excluded Members into the House’ and was comprehensively defeated.39Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 166; CJ vii. 426b. Most of these 29 MPs have been accounted Presbyterians.40M.J. Tibbetts, ‘Parlty. Parties under Oliver Cromwell’ (Bryn Mawr Univ. PhD thesis, 1944), 127-9. Hall was named to ten committees in this Parliament, but made no recorded contribution to debate.41CJ vii. 443a, 447a, 448b, 466b, 469a, 472b, 488b, 559b, 588a. Four of the committees to which he was nominated concerned the maintenance of a preaching ministry.42CJ vii. 448b, 469a, 488b, 588a. His most important appointment was on 22 December 1656, when he was named second to a committee to consider several petitions relating to fen-drainage and land enclosure disputes on the Hatfield Level and the Isle of Axholme. Hall had presented one of these petitions, which was from the inhabitants of Epworth concerning ‘some commons encroached upon’. The committee was also ordered to consider a counter-petition, complaining of the ‘barbarous and inhuman riots’ of the inhabitants of Epworth, which had allegedly been instigated by the former Leveller leaders John Lilburne and John Wildman*.43CJ vii. 472b; Burton’s Diary, i. 199; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 188-222.

Almost nothing is known about Hall after the dissolution of the second protectorate Parliament early in 1658. Restored to the Holland magistracy in March 1660, he retained his place on the bench until 1670; and he continued to be named to Lincolnshire sewers commissions until his death in May 1675.44C231/7, p. 374; Lincs. RO, Spalding Sewers/451/1, passim; A Perfect List (1660). He was buried at Donington on 12 May.45Lincs. Peds. 440. It is clear from his will that he was a man of considerable wealth. His second wife, Sarah, came with a portion of £2,771, and he bequeathed lands to her, by way of jointure, worth at least £320 a year. In the preface to his will, he describes himself as ‘one of Adam’s sinful seed’, and he appointed his ‘cousin’ Edward Dickinson, the ejected minister of Horncastle, Lincolnshire, as one of his supervisors.46PROB11/350, ff. 240v-242v; Calamy Revised, 164. None of Hall’s immediate family sat in any future Parliament.