William Hall was born on 1 June 1748 at Willow Booth, a small island in the fen district of Lincolnshire.
His parents were very poor, and he himself at a very early age married a girl named Suke or Sukey Holmes, and became a gozzard, or keeper and breeder of geese.
But the floods swept away his flock, which (he complains) were appropriated by his neighbours, and after much wandering he settled in Marshland in Norfolk, where he gained for some time a living as an auctioneer and "cow-leech", while his wife practised midwifery and phlebotomy.
Here he asserts (in verse) that his arm broke on account of rheumatic throbbing, whereupon he removed to Lynn, and commenced business as a dealer in old books.
"Low-Fen-Bill", as he sometimes styled himself, had a perception of his own faults, which he describes when mentioning John Taylor the "Water Poet", Who near two centuries agoWrote much such nonsense as I do.But, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, his doggerel is not without a certain Hudibrastic force, and it frequently contains graphic touches descriptive of modes of fen life now passed away.