Thomas may have belonged to a junior branch of the old Essex family of Bataill seated at Stapleford, whose male line had died out earlier in the century.
The Bataills were tenants on the lordship of Clare and played a small part in the affairs of its noble owners. John Bataill (either the father or brother of Thomas) was named by the heiress Elizabeth de Burgh, duchess of Clarence (d.1363) as an executor of her will; early in 1366 Thomas himself was in Ireland in the company of Elizabeth’s former husband Lionel, duke of Clarence; and much later, in 1382, John the brother was to be appointed as steward of Clare and of other estates of the inheritance of Elizabeth’s grandson, Roger Mortimer, earl of March.
Sir Robert Tey
† and his son Robert, and they were often recorded in association with the brothers
Sir John
† and Sir Richard Sutton, notably in transactions concerning a manor in White Roding which, with their help, was settled on John Hende, the London draper. Hende in his turn was drawn into the Bataills’ more complicated dealings with regard to the manor of Bradwell near Coggeshall. In December 1379 Sir Nicholas Dagworth formally conveyed this property to Thomas and John Bataill, but three months later it was seized by the escheator and, although the Bataills were subsequently permitted to farm it on condition that they would answer for the profits at the Exchequer should Bradwell be adjudged to the Crown, they were summoned with Dagworth and Hende to the Parliament of 1382 (Oct.) to defend their claim. The outcome is unclear.
Bataill served a term as escheator of Essex and Hertfordshire and another as sheriff (during which he held the elections to both Parliaments of 1384), before his own first return to Parliament in 1390. By then it would appear that he was well known to a group of local gentry attached to Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, whose castle at Pleshey was not far from Bataill’s home. In the 1380s he had been on good terms with some of Gloucester’s retainers: he had acted as mainpernor for Sir John Lakenheath and Thomas Lampet (probably members of the duke’s council), as feoffee of the property of Robert Rikedon (a lawyer in the duke’s employ) and as witness to deeds for Sir John Gildesburgh (Gloucester’s supporter) and for Robert Braybrooke, bishop of London (his friend). John Boys of Tolleshunt, later if not already steward of the duchess of Gloucester’s household, served as a feoffee of Bataill’s lands and was later to marry one of his daughters. But the evidence is circumstantial; no personal link between Bataill and the duke himself has yet been discovered, so it should not necessarily be presumed that he was returned to Parliament in the duke’s interest.
Bataill died not long after May 1395. He left a son, John, who in September 1397, on the eve of his departure on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, made a will in which he provided for the fulfilment of his father’s last testament and for the payment of his debts. Ten marks were set aside to glaze a window in the church of Walden abbey in memory of Thomas Bataill, and prayers were to be said for him in Matching church. John put the lands he had inherited from his father into the hands of trustees (who included Sir Alexander Walden, a neighbour and kinsman by marriage), and he confirmed a bequest of 200 marks made by Thomas for the marriage of his daughter Margaret (John’s sister). After John’s death there arose a dispute between John Boys (who married Margaret) and John Barrington (who married her sister Alice) as to a fair partition of the Bataill lands, the matter finally being settled by the arbitration of Joan, countess of Hereford.