James Hall (historian)

James Hall (20 February 1846 – 6 October 1914) was an English antiquary, historian and schoolteacher, best known for his history of the Cheshire town of Nantwich, which remains among the principal sources for the town's history. He also edited accounts of the English Civil War and documents relating to Combermere Abbey. Another work on the history of Combermere Abbey, Newhall and Wrenbury was never published; its manuscript has been lost. Hall is commemorated in Nantwich in several ways, including a street named for him.

Hall was born in the Brayford Head district of Lincoln on 20 February 1846. His father, also James Hall (born 1816), captained a steam packet which plied the River Witham between Lincoln and Boston, and his paternal grandfather, William Hall (born 1765), had been a waterman in Lincoln. His mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of George Markham, a farmer from the village of Treswell in Nottinghamshire. They had married in 1843; Hall was the second of their ten children, five of whom died in infancy, and their only surviving son. He grew up in Grantham Street in the centre of the city of Lincoln, where the family moved after his father gave up working on the river to become a rate collector and manager of the Lincoln and Lincolnshire Building Society.

The family were Wesleyan Methodists and worshipped at Clasketgate Chapel, where Hall's father taught at the Sunday school. From 1854, Hall attended the Wesleyan Day School in Grantham Street (later in Rosemary Street), rising to become a pupil–teacher. He received tuition on the piano from the well-known teacher C. A. Ehrenfechter, and was also taught the organ by the Clasketgate Chapel organist. Deciding to make his career in teaching, he joined the Wesleyan Training College at Westminster in 1864, graduating first in his year in English two years later.

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