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Blickling Hall: The building of a Jacobean mansion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Caroline Stanley-Millson  and
John Newman
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Extract

Blickling Hall in Norfolk is one of the best-known Jacobean mansions. Its south (entrance) and east façades (Figs 3 and 4) are outstanding pieces of architecture of the period and the rich emblematic plasterwork of the long gallery ceiling is justly celebrated. The date of its commencement, 1619, is carved in a prominent place in the entrance courtyard, and even the name of its architect, Robert Lyming, has long been known, for in the parish registers of Blickling his death in 1628 is recorded with the words ‘architect and builder of Blickling Hall’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 29 , 1986 , pp. 1 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1986

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References

Notes

1 MC3/43, 5 recto.

2 This document gives the total expenditure for the year up to 20 September 1621 but no details after 16 May.

3 Norfolk County Record Office, NRS 14649. The account book begins on 21 April 1627. Lyming is mentioned in it several times, designated as ‘undertaker at Blicklinge’ and ‘Contryver of yor workes’.

4 Blomefield, F., History of Norfolk, III (1769), 633 ffGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., III (1769), 28, 541, 703.

6 Norfolk Record Office, NRS 11260, 27, D4, dated 14 January 1616/17; Blomefield, op. cit., III, 633.

7 Norfolk Record Office, NRS 12546, 27, 62.

8 Appendix B.

9 The external brickwork of the north wall of the hall is clearly of the 1760s. The window may be a Jacobean one reset.

10 Stone, L., Family and Fortune (1973), 62–91 Google Scholar.

11 MC3/43, 2 verso, plasterer’s contract. See Appendix A.

12 Colvin, H. (ed.), The History of the King’s Works, IV (1982), 323 Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 85. Airs, M., ‘Blickling Hall’, Archaeological Journal, 137 (1980), 336 Google Scholar.

14 PRO, E35 1/3249-51. Airs, loc. cit., also notes that Thomas Style undertook contract work in the early 1603s at Covent Garden, for St Paul’s church and the Piazza.

15 MC3/43, 3 recto and MC3/47.

16 MC3/48, 7 recto.

17 MC3/43, 14 recto and verso.

18 MC3/46, 12 verso.

19 MC3/46, 6 verso.

20 MC3/48, 2 recto.

21 MC3/48, 4 recto.

22 MC3/48, 8 recto and MC3/49.

23 Monumental inscription in Blickling church (paraphrased in Blomefield, op. cit., 111, 641); Walpole Society, VII (1918-19), 120, 122.

24 L. Stone, op. cit., 76, 79.

25 MC3/43, 2 verso.

26 We are most grateful to Mr Sumpster for making available a copy of his record drawing and for elucidating it.

27 Sir John Hobart’s account book, Norfolk Record Office, NRS 14649.

28 Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her second husband, the Hon. George Berkeley; from 1712 to 1767 [ed. Croker, J. W.], 2 vols (1824), 11, 305-06Google Scholar, 2nd earl of Buckinghamshire to Lady Suffolk, 10 November 1765. We owe this reference to Dr Maddison.

29 Sir John Hobart’s account book.

30 Blomefield, op. cit., 111, 635, confirmed by NRS 12885/27/E/6.

31 Reproduced in Architectural History, 7 (1964), 45.

32 A full account of the staircase must be reserved for another occasion.

33 A valuation of Blickling Hall in 1756 (Norfolk Record Office, MC3/252) refers to ‘an extraordinary good Gallery now made into a Library with a compleat Marble Chimney Peice & cost the late Earl above £1000 fitting up’.

34 Sir John Hobart’s account book.

35 Ibid.

36 See correspondence of the architect William Burn to the Marchioness of Lothian in Norfolk Record Office, MC3/263/7 etc. Burn has this to say about the west front (7 January 1865): ‘It appears that the west front of the house had at some time or other been cased with 9 inch brick, but most unaccountably had been carried up without a single bond stone or brick being introduced into the old wall, and the consequence is that in some places it has bulged out and is in a dangerous condition . . . I have never in any building met with such an extraordinary amount of patched work, old door and window openings filled in with rubbish, and rotten walls in every direction where we had to work as in this house.’

The present west wall would seem to be a nineteenth-century strengthening of an eighteenth-century refacing of the essentially medieval wall which was heightened but not significantly rebuilt c.1620.

37 Little more than the front wall of this range is original. It was completely remodelled, with a new back wall and numerous conspicuous stacks of chimneys by William Burn c. 1865, and has been reworked internally again recently to provide offices for the East Anglian regional headquarters of the National Trust.

38 Pevsner, N., The Buildings of England: North-East Norfolk and Norwich (Harmondsworth, 1962), 98 Google Scholar, ‘So the Dutch gables are among the earliest in existence’ clearly has this implication.

39 Louw, H.J., ‘Anglo-Netherlandish architectural interchange c.1600-c.1660’, Architectural History, 24 (1981), 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Archaeologicaljoumal, 137 (1980), 343.

41 Norfolk County Record Office, WKC 5/420.