LAMER, Thomas (d.1397/8), of Dorchester, Dorset and London.

At an inquiry held at Dorchester in February 1375, it was found that Lamer had exported wheat to Bordeaux in the previous November and, more recently, had dispatched another such cargo from Melcombe Regis to a destination not known. He shipped cloth from the same port in the 1380s, and in February 1384 obtained a royal licence to export 40 sacks of wool. It was at Melcombe Regis that, in October 1387, he received a grant for five years of the farm of the customs, for which he was to pay £20 a year at the Exchequer.CIMisc. iii. no. 974; CFR, x. 200; E122/102/12, 15. Meanwhile, in August 1386, he and his wife had obtained royal confirmation of an indenture in which Robert, abbot of Sherborne, had granted them board and lodging in the abbey for the term of Lamer’s life and a pension for Christine if she survived him. In 1389, the couple acquired a messuage in Dorchester from John Glover, and, in 1397, were also in possession of another, in ‘Frerenlane’. However, either in that or the following year, Lamer died, and it was to his widow that in 1398 livery of seisin of his property was granted, the deed in question describing him as ‘late citizen of London’. The property included lands and tenements in Sutton Poyntz, two tenements in Dorchester and the reversion of three shops in High Street there. Thomas’s widow died some time before 1413 when their son John, who had been granted the reversion of the two tenements in Dorchester, had taken possession. Lamer also left a daughter, Joan, who, with her husband, William Bullock, was re-enfeoffed in 1419 of two burgages of his in South Street.CPR, 1385-9, p. 206; Recs. Dorchester ed. Mayo, 129, 196-7, 229; Dorset Feet of Fines, ii. 210.