Rufford Old Hall

Rufford Old Hall is a National Trust property in Rufford, Lancashire, in north-west England. Built in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries for the Hesketh family, only the great hall survives from the original structure. A brick-built wing in the Jacobean style was added in 1661, at right angles to the great hall, and a third wing was added in the 1820s.

The hall is designated by English Heritage as a Grade I listed building, and the cottage, coach house and stables in the courtyard at the rear of the hall are designated Grade II.

Rufford features the only known surviving example of a sixteenth-century carved wooden screen made of bog oak; a collection of rural memorabilia displayed in the stables and throughout the house; and a collection of arms and armour from the fifteenth to the seventeenth-century. The best-known feature of the Victorian gardens is a giant pair of topiary squirrels.

History

Early years

Rufford Old Hall – located in the village of Rufford, Lancashire, north of Ormskirk – was built for the Hesketh family, lords of the manor of Rufford. The present owner, the National Trust, dates the building to around 1530,Dean, p. 2 but the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner puts the date earlier, at the late fifteenth century, comparing the architecture with contemporary historic houses in Lancashire: Smithills Hall, Ordsall Hall and Samlesbury Hall. Some sources state that it was built for Sir Robert Hesketh, but Pevsner calls this guesswork.Pevsner, p. 212 The Trust suggests his father, Sir Thomas Hesketh, as builder.Greeves, p. 270 There is a local tradition that the young William Shakespeare performed at the hall, although there is no evidence to substantiate it.

The oldest surviving part of the hall is a timber-framed manor house. The great hall is the central part of an H-shaped structure which originally had two wings. It is an outstanding example of Tudor hammerbeam construction, richly carved and broadly proportioned. The timber-framed west wing containing the family apartments has disappeared, reportedly burnt down, and in 1662 a new brick building with accommodation for both family and servants was built to the north of the east wing. The east wing was rebuilt in the 1720s using sixteenth-century timbers brought from Holmeswood Hall, another Hesketh residence, not far from Rufford. It contains the dining room, anteroom and first-floor drawing room.

18th century to present day

By the mid-eighteenth century, Tudor houses like Rufford were regarded as old fashioned and insufficiently luxurious. Sir Thomas Hesketh, first baronet, had a more comfortable house built in neo-classical style – Rufford New Hall – nearby. The house was abandoned as a residence in about 1798, after which it was for a time occupied by a tenant farmer, and the banqueting hall housed a village school. It was repaired and refitted in 1821 for the eldest son of the family, Thomas Henry Hesketh. The east wing was enlarged and remodelled in Tudor Gothic style, to complement both the half-timbered great hall on one side and the red-brick building of 1662 on the other. Thomas Henry Hesketh lived there until his succession to the estates as the fourth baronet in 1842. According to the National Trust, the antiquarian treatment in the 1820s, following on from that of the 1720s, firmly established Rufford Old Hall as "a house of Gothic romance, for which the Victorian Heskeths delighted in acquiring old oak furniture, stained glass and arms and armour". Simon Jenkins is less convinced by the Victorian Jacobethan additions, suggesting that they give the hall's exterior, "too much the appearance of a Swiss chalet".Jenkins, 2003, pp. 409-410

In 1867 the Heskeths inherited the estate of Easton Neston in Northamptonshire, and from that time Rufford ceased to be the main family seat. From 1920 the Old Hall was briefly occupied by Thomas Fermor-Hesketh, later first Baron Hesketh, who in 1936 presented the house and its grounds to the National Trust, together with historically important contents and a well-established Victorian garden.

From the start of its ownership, the National Trust sought to equip the hall with furniture contemporary with the original building. In 1937 the trust appealed for donations so that the hall could be furnished, as far as possible, as it was at the time it was built. The hall became a popular attraction for visitors, even during the Second World War. The timbers in the great hall have twice suffered attack from death watch beetle, in 1948 and 1958, threatening the gable end of the great hall with collapse, and causing considerable outlay on remedial work. It was necessary to dismantle the whole roof and steep the timbers to render them immune to the beetle before the timbers could be replaced.

The hall is reputedly haunted by at least three ghosts: a grey lady, a man in Elizabethan clothing, and Queen Elizabeth I.

Architecture

In his 1969 volume on the buildings of Lancashire, Pevsner writes:

The frontage has bay windows to the right and the entrance door to the left, alongside the more dominant, two-storey gable of the east wing.

The timber-framed hall house is in a late medieval pattern which continued in use in Tudor times. The hall, which formed the south wing, is substantially as built, long and wide, with the timbers sitting on a low stone wall. The prominent lantern on the roof is a nineteenth-century addition. The hall has a flagged floor. It has a stone chimney, five bays, and a hammerbeam roof. The five hammerbeams each terminate, at both ends, in a carved wooden angel. Pevsner writes of the interior of the great hall, "It is the most overpowering of them all, of an exuberance of decoration matched nowhere else in England". In a 2007 survey of historic buildings Simon Jenkins writes, "This wonderful room embodies the splendour of Lancashire’s late Middle Ages".

In 1661 a Jacobean-style rustic brick wing was built at right angles to the great hall, which contrasts with the medieval black and white timbering. This wing was built from small two-inch bricks similar to Bank Hall, and Carr House and St Michael's Church in Much Hoole. This wing is notable for being given a symmetrical façade at a time when the prevailing style in Lancashire was still for asymmetrically disposed low mullioned windows. There are five bays and a doorway with a segmental hood (a later addition); the windows have wooden crosses and segmental relieving arches with brick decoration in their tympana.

In the 1820s a third wing was constructed, formed out of the medieval domestic offices, and a castellated tower was built to join the great hall to the Charles II wing. In the twentieth century a hidden chamber, possibly used as a priest hole in the sixteenth century, was discovered above the great hall.

Fixtures and fittings

A carved wooden screen made of bog oak is the only known surviving example from the first half of the sixteenth century. The free-standing screen is nominally movable, but Pevsner calls it "a monster of a screen, and movable only if you accept a very optimistic meaning of the term".Pevsner, p. 213 He continues:

In keeping with the character of the hall, much of the furniture is of oak. It includes an unusually large press cupboard; a sixteenth-century free-standing cabinet with carved decoration of classical heads and allegorical scenes;Dean, p. 10 and two panel-back oak settles with cabriole legs, known as "couch chairs", of a type familiar in Lancashire in the eighteenth century.
On the staircase is a painting by Godfrey Kneller of Thomas Hesketh, who was Second MP for Preston in 1722 and who rebuilt the east wing in the 1720s, seen with his wife Martha and son in 1723.

Gardens

Very little of the gardens' early history is known. Parks and Gardens UK

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