Thrale/Thrall history

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as deponent in 1613 that he knew Sir Robert Napier, Sir Thomas Rotherham Kt and others and that he knows the town of Luton, having been born and bred there; that he lived at a place called Thrales End all his life, as bachelor and married man. He remembers that at a Court Leet about twenty years earlier Mr. George Rotherham, then lord of the manor, said 'you my neyghboures of Thrales End you have inclosed divers of your groundes there, whereby yow have done me wrong in abridging me of my lybertye in hawkings and hunting and do cause me oftantymes to goe abought where usually I have followed my sport the nearest waye'³⁵

A rather more sad record was left by Edward Thrale of Thrales End, this record now kept in Dr. Napier's notebooks in the Bodleian Library. Edward's notes on two pages are interspersed with signs used by an apothecary. The geometrical signs Edward used suggests that the page was a palimpsest or parchment which could be written on many times. Part of a page reads:-

To interpret 6 p.m. for 'post meriden' would be anachronistic and the whole phrase probably is 'obit horae propria manu' (he died in the sixth hour by his own hand) and the whole passage indicates mental illness.

Whether the adage of clogs to clogs in three generations be an exact truth or not, it is a fact that the family were in financial difficulties during 1645 to 1648. Thomas Thrale of Thrales End in the parish of Luton, Bedford, yeoman, and his son John Thrale, mortgaged a messuage and 200 acres in Thrales End to Robert Jaques for £450.³⁶ Jaques was a member of a well known Hertfordshire-Bedfordshire family already mentioned, although at this time he was living at Nightingale Lane, East Smithfield. Three years later Robert Jaques, citizen and brewer of

Footnotes

35. Cha. Town Deps. (17 C24/388). ↩︎
36. British Museum Add. Charter 35/190. ↩︎