Throughout his career Dalton was styled ‘junior’, and it may reasonably be inferred that he was the son of Thomas Dalton, senior, an obscure figure who was alive at least as late as December 1454.
Having been appointed to his first borough office as one of the four stewards of the fair in September 1451, on 26 July 1452 Dalton witnessed an important settlement made by Thomas Charite* as a feoffee of John Church I*, and on 8 Jan. 1453 he sat on a jury before the county j.p.s at Leicester. In the following year he was elected to the mayoralty and, very unusually, was reappointed to the office at the end of both his first and second terms. Not until September 1457 was he replaced.
Dalton’s mayoralty was an eventful one. In Michaelmas term 1455 the county sheriff, Thomas Berkeley†, brought a bill against him in the court of King’s bench. He complained that, on the previous 7 June at Sewstern in the north-east of the county, Dalton had collected as many as 500 malefactors with the intention of killing him, but had settled instead for assaulting and then imprisoning him for two days. No doubt his bill was an exaggerated description of the event – there was, for example, no parallel indictment before the j.p.s – but clearly something more than a routine trespass had taken place. This is unlikely to have arisen out of a personal quarrel between the two men, and it is more probable that the underlying dispute was between Berkeley as sheriff and Dalton as mayor. Berkeley was probably championing the cause of the royal bailiff of Leicester, Richard Hotoft*, who had incurred the enmity of the elected officials. On 27 June our MP had been obliged to find surety of the peace to Hotoft in the court of King’s bench. More revealingly, at a common hall held on the following 7 Nov. Hotoft was said to have ‘ex maliuolo corde et malicia’ unjustly indicted the mayor and the community in divers courts of the King, and, as a result, it was decided that all these unjust actions should be defended ‘tanquam materie et querele tote communitati ville ... tangentes et pertinentes’. Not improbably the sheriff’s bill was one of the actions the burgesses had in mind. Moreover, in the same law term, Dalton appeared personally in the court of common pleas to sue Hotoft and three townsmen for threatening him at Leicester, which suggests that not all the leading inhabitants were opposed to Hotoft. Nevertheless, this dispute probably explains Dalton’s election to the Parliament which met four weeks after the alleged assault at Sewstern, and his reappointments to the mayoralty (in defiance of the borough ordinance of 1379 forbidding the serving of successive mayoral terms).
Premature death meant that Dalton makes few other appearances in the records. On 25 Aug. 1455, between the first and second sessions of the Parliament of which he was a Member, he was said to have assaulted one Thomas Worteley at Islington (Middlesex), but there is no evidence to give this alleged offence a context. Later, on 20 Oct. 1456, he was again absent from his native Leicester when he came personally into the court of King’s bench to plead not guilty to Berkeley’s bill.
In the following January he was one of several local clergy and townsmen, including William Wigston* and John Pacy, who appeared before royal commissioners at Leicester to testify that they ‘fuerunt socii scolares in scolis’ with the clerk who had been wrongfully treated as an alien Scot.
He seems to have died during Michaelmas term 1458 when process was issued against him for a debt of £29 15s. 4d. at the suit of Hotoft, and his widow was contesting this debt as his executrix.