biography text
It is impossible to identify this Member with any degree of certainty, although a Thomas Copeland appears in both 1398 and 1401 as a commissioner of inquiry at Richmond in north Yorkshire. The same man may, perhaps, have been a collector of subsidies in the port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne a few years later, but there is no evidence to connect him with Scarborough. The family estates seem to have been situated near Kirkby Ravensworth, where, in 1459, a Thomas Copeland and his wife, Eleanor, the widow of Thomas Leeds, made a conveyance of property.1CPR, 1396-9, p. 439; 1399-1401, p. 460; CFR, xiii. 69, 70, 72, 81, 84, 107; VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 91.