Family and Education

Offices Held

Biography

The only man of this name mentioned in the records of Totnes was assessed to contribute no more than 2d. towards the parliamentary subsidies levied in 1414 and was ignominiously removed from the office of town crier nine years later.1 The MP is much more likely to have been the John Hille ‘esquire’ who was active in the area of Totnes and Dartmouth in 1403 and 1404 carrying out the King’s orders for the restitution of vessels and merchandise seized at sea.2 Details of his career are unclear, however.3

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

He is not to be identified with Sir John Hill† (the names are interchangeable) of Hills Court, Exeter, j.KB, who received a personal summons to all the Parliaments convened between 1390 and his death in 1408; nor with the judge’s son John (by his second wife Maud Daubeney), who cannot have been more than 14 at the time of the Parliament in question.

• 1. H.R. Watkin, Totnes Priory and Town, 325, 352.
• 2. CPR, 1401-5, pp. 276, 363-4, 424-5, 427-8.
• 3. It may have been this John Hille who had been retained for life at Bordeaux on 22 Nov. 1388 to serve John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, in peace and war, for a fee of ten marks a year from the issues of the lordship of Kingston Lacy, Dorset. Richard II confirmed this annuity, with the addition of five marks, on 20 Mar. 1399 (Cam. Misc. xxii. 97; CPR, 1396-9, p. 446).