Hall, or Halle, EDWARD, English historian, was born in London in 1499, of a family settled in Shropshire, but of German descent. He was educated at Eton, became scholar of King's College, Cambridge, in 1514, and junior Fellow in due course, next studied at Gray's Inn, and heard some of the lectures of Wolsey's foundation at Oxford. He became one of the common sergeants and under-sheriff of the city of London, and afterwards a judge in the sheriff-court, and died in 1547, in the same year with Henry VIII. Next year his history was printed from his manuscript by Richard Grafton, under the title, The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and Yorke. It was composed mostly in his younger years, but was only brought down to 1532; the rest, down to 1546, was completed by Grafton. The exceptionally large number of variations in the copies make this thick black-letter folio something of a bibliographical curiosity.
Hall's work is one of the finest of our early histories, and the stately dignity of its style and reality of its figures had a charm for the dramatic sense of Shakespeare. To the student of the reign of Henry VIII. it is especially valuable as the truthful and intelligent evidence of an eye-witness, and if his account of his king is too uniformly eulogistic, we must remember how inestimably valuable to his legal mind was the present blessing of a settled domestic peace after the bloodshed and distraction of the Roses. Hall loves to describe with detail scenes of pomp and pageantry, such as made splendid the early years of Henry's reign—a taste that harmonises well with the stately and pompous Latinisms of his English. The best edition is that by Sir Henry Ellis (1809).