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HOSKINS, William.
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Constituency
Dates
Family and Education
Offices Held
Biography
It was not uncommon for Westbury to return men from its neighbourhood to Parliament and the existence of a family called Hoskins at Westbury Leigh, on the south side of the town, during the early 16th century creates the presumption that the Member of 1555 was of local origin. He is perhaps identifiable with one of two namesakes living to the north of the town in 1576, at Hawkeridge and Heywood where both were assessed for the subsidy on land worth £3. Either of these men may have been the canon lawyer who graduated at Oxford in 1535 or the student admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1554. Another William Hoskins who was a tailor died in 1580 at ‘Chewton’ in Somerset; if his home was at Chewton Keynsham he was a neighbour of Peter Morgan who had sat for Westbury in 1554, or if at Chewton Mendip he was similarly connected with John Buckland who served for the borough in 1558.1
The question remains whether the ‘Mr. Hodgskyns’ who appears on the list of Sir Anthony Kingston’s supporters in this Parliament was the Member for Westbury (whose other Member (Sir) Thomas Throckmorton I also figures on the list) or a near namesake who sat for one of the several constituencies for which the Members’ names are lost. It is not difficult to believe that Hoskins’s name underwent a modest change on this list, as did various others, but the case for regarding the ‘Mr. Hodgskyns’ of the list as another man is set out in the entry for Henry Hodgkins.2