Family and Education

b. by 1507. m. (1) or (2) ?sis. of John Soller.2

Offices Held

Sheriff, Gloucester 1528-9, 1533-4, alderman 1533-d., master of St. Margaret’s hospital 1535-6, 1548-9, mayor 1540-1, 1552-3, coroner 1548-9; clerk of the creeks and passages belonging to Bristol 30 Dec. 1556.3

Biography

Thomas Payne may have been a descendant of a Bristol namesake who dealt in wine in the late 15th century, and a kinsman of Anthony Payne, importer of wine in the 1540s. He was styled merchant in 1544 when he acquired the site of the Greyfriars, Gloucester. In 1556 he settled this property, where he was then living, upon Thomas Pirry and his wife, who were to lease it to him for 50 years at a rent of £10. Payne built the city’s conduit for which he was paid £75 in 1551, and he was responsible for its maintenance until his death.4

Payne owed the experience of sitting in Parliament at the opening of Mary’s reign to the mayoralty of Sir Thomas Bell who had established a lien on one of the city’s seats, and to the provision of a seat elsewhere for the recorder, Sir John Pollard. He was first elected at the close of his own second mayoral year. Unlike his fellow-Member Thomas Loveday, he received payment in full for the Parliament of April 1554. In both these Parliaments Payne was appropriately returned as senior Member (he and Bell are often called ‘the eldest aldermen’ in the city’s records), but on his third and last election in 1558 he took second place to the new recorder, Richard Pate.5

Payne made his will as a sick man on 7 Aug. 1559, asking to be buried in the choir of Christ Church near to his last wife. He left sums of money to the poor, and to a number of servants and others including his brother-in-law John Soller and his kinsman Thomas Barbour. To Thomas Pirry, overseer of the will, he left gowns, furniture and the instruments in his brewhouse, and to his kinsman William Soller of London the site of the Greyfriars in tail male with remainder to the children of William Haserd, late alderman of Gloucester, whom he named executor. He died on 19 Mar. 1560.6

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: M. K. Dale

Notes

• 1. Gloucester Guildhall 1394, f. 42; Bodl. e Museo 17.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference. PCC 53 Mellershe.
• 3. LP Hen. VIII, xiii, xvi; W. H. Stevenson, Cal. Recs. Gloucester, 23; CPR, 1555-7, p. 257; Gloucester Guildhall 1300; 1375, ff. 28, 30v.
• 4. Overseas Trade of Bristol (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), nos. 144, 162; APC, i. 267, 296; LP Hen. VIII, xix; Stevenson, 1253-5; PCC 37 Blamyr, 23 Adeane; Gloucester Guildhall 1394, ff. 22v-71.
• 5. Gloucester Guildhall 1300, ff. 127v-32v; 1394, ff. 22-67; 1397, ff. 42-43v.
• 6. PCC 53 Mellershe; Gloucester Guildhall 1375, f. 30v.