The smiling youthful faces of the figures in this most remarkable brass, and the modern-looking whiskers and beard and moustache, combined with the helmet, give a singularly unancient look to the wearers, and irresistibly call to mind what one has so often seen of late in the twentieth-century pageants.
DODDINGTON HALL
Between the road which runs west from Lincoln to Saxilby, and the old Roman Foss Way from Lincoln to Newark, which went on by Leicester, Cirencester, and Bath to Axminster, a tongue of Nottinghamshire runs deep into the county. South of this and north of the Foss Way are a few villages of no particular importance, amongst them Eagle, which was once a preceptory of the Knights Templars. But here also, within six miles of Lincoln, is Doddington. This deserves especial mention for its fine Elizabethan hall, which is still very much as it was three hundred years ago.
DODDINGTON HALL
The station of Doddington and Harby is just over the border, and Harby village is in Nottinghamshire. A statue over the doorway in the church tower commemorates the fact that Here Queen Eleanor died. Edward I. was holding a council at Clipston in Sherwood Forest in 1290 when the queen was taken ill and was removed to the house of one of her gentlemen in attendance who lived at Harby. After her death her heart was buried in Lincoln Minster and her embalmed body was taken by stages to Westminster, a beautiful cross being subsequently ordered to be set up at each resting place, ten of the thirteen were either not completed or subsequently destroyed, all those in the county being among the number. These were at Lincoln, Grantham, and Stamford. The only three Eleanor crosses that have survived the abominable destruction of all beautiful things from which the country suffered, first at the hands of Henry VIII.’s minister Cromwell, and then from the acts of Parliament passed by the iconoclasts of the Reformation, and finally by the soldiery of the Civil War, are at Northampton, Geddington, and Waltham.
AND ITS OWNERS
The first owner of Doddington Manor that we know of was one Ailric, in Edward the Confessor’s time, who gave it as an endowment to the newly built Abbey of Westminster. The family of Pigot held it under the abbot, paying a rent of £12, and the estate remained with them till 1486, after which Sir John Pigot, having no heir, his widow sold it to Sir Thomas Burgh of the Old Hall, Gainsborough, and his family 100 years later sold it, in 1586, to John Savile, M.P. for Lincoln; but when, seven years later, he ceased to represent the town, he sold it to Thomas Taylor, for many years registrar to the Bishops of Lincoln. He was a wealthy man, and at once set to work to build the present hall, which was finished in 1600. It is built of red and black brick with stone quoins and mullions, and is approached by a stone gateway with two brick storeys above it and three gables. It stands between two quadrangles, with gardens in that on the west, and with a cedar-planted lawn on the east, and the E-shaped house is surmounted by three octagonal brick turrets with leaden cupolas. It is 160 feet long and seventy-five feet deep on the wings. There is no superfluous ornament, all being solidly plain but harmonious outside, and with fine stately rooms inside. The hall is fifty-three feet by twenty-two, and the long gallery on the third floor ninety-six feet by twenty-two, the house being all one room thick. A good deal of internal decoration—oak panels, a staircase, and marble chimney-pieces, and heavy architraves over the doors—was the work of Lord Delaval about 1760. The pictures are numerous, mostly family portraits, one being of Lord Hussey of Sleaford, beheaded after the Lincolnshire rebellion, 1536. At the south end of the long gallery is a group by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Thomas Taylor died in 1607, and his son in 1652, when the estate devolved on his niece, Lady Hussey of Honington. Her husband, whose great uncle was the man beheaded by order of Henry VIII., was fined as a Royalist in 1646 in the enormous sum of £10,200, of which £8,759 was actually paid—half of it in his lifetime, and the rest by his widow and his eldest son’s widow, Rhoda, who had for her second husband married Lord Fairfax. The accession to her uncle’s estate at Doddington just two years after she had cleared this huge debt on Honington must have been truly welcome to Lady Hussey, but she only lived to enjoy it for six years, and was succeeded by her grandson, Sir Thomas Hussey, who lived till 1706. Then his title passed to Sir Edward Hussey of Caythorpe and his estate to his three daughters, the last of whom, Mrs. Sarah Apreece, by will dated 1747, settled it on her daughter, Rhoda, the wife of Captain Francis Blake-Delaval, R.N., who had large estates in Northumberland, Seaton Delaval, Ford Castle near Flodden Field, and Dissington. The estate remained with the Delavals till 1814, when Edward Hussey Delaval, a learned man of science and an F.R.S., died, and was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Lord Delaval held the property for nearly forty years and spent much on the house, but to spite his brother Edward he had the meanness to cut down all the timber of any value. His youngest daughter was the beautiful Countess of Tyrconnel who died in 1800, and to her daughter he left Ford Castle. He himself died at the age of eighty at Seaton Delaval, and was buried in the family vault in St. Paul’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey.
His brother Edward was only one year younger, but lived to the age of eighty-five. Then, in 1814, Seaton Delaval went to his nephew, Sir Jacob Astley, but Doddington to his widow and daughter, the latter of whom became Mrs. Gunman. The mother survived the daughter, and in 1829 it was found that they had left all their property to a friend, Colonel George Ralph Payne Jarvis, who had served in the Peninsular War, and whose grandson, Mr. G. Eden Jarvis, is the present owner.