LAMB, Thomas, of Maldon, Essex.

A merchant, ‘chapman’ and ‘schypman’, Lamb traded in several commodities, including fish, tar and grain, and in February 1427 he, Robert Darcy I* and William Ayllewyn*, were licensed to export grain overseas. Ct. rolls 1422-4, 1429-32, 1433-5, 1435-7, D/B 3/3/14, 18, 20, 22; DKR, xlviii. 247. Ten years later he witnessed a conveyance of property in Maldon, but nothing is known about his own holdings there, save that he was leasing a ‘colehepe’ from the borough in the early 1420s. Ct. bk. D/B 3/1/1, ff. 22, 28. Apart from Darcy and Ayllewyn, he counted John Cooper* among his associates at Maldon. A fellow merchant, Cooper appointed Lamb one of his executors, in which role the MP was party to a couple of lawsuits in the court of common pleas in 1427. These actions, in which Lamb and his co-executors were the defendants, arose from bonds that Cooper had allegedly entered into at London. He and his fellow defendants contested both suits, although they lost at least one of them, an action that Thomas Welles of Maldon and London had brought to recover a debt of £15 arising from a bond that he had received from Cooper in 1422. In due course, a jury found for Welles whose attorney reappeared at Westminster in May 1428, to notify the court that he had received his debt and damages of 40s. from the defendants. CP40/666, rots. 305, 344. Lamb must have died shortly after his last term as bailiff expired, since in March 1439 his widow was suing the abbot of Beeleigh for debt in the borough’s court. In the late fifteenth century, Robert Lamb of Maldon pursued a Chancery suit over properties in Maldon that had belonged to his late brother, John: it is likely that Robert and John were near relatives of the MP, if not his sons. Ct. roll D/B 3/3/25, m. 1d; C1/147/6.