Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Melbourne Castle
Some castles grew from purely Norman military motte-and-bailey castles, constructed by William the Conqueror’s knights to keep a firm hold on England. Others are later affairs, fortified houses built later in the middle ages or even in the Tudor Age more as symbolic castles than effective defensive buildings. Later still, houses like Elvaston or Bretby had ‘castle’ added in lieu of ‘hall’ for effect. If one was a member of the medieval elite, with a largish house built around one or even two courtyards, adding defensive works was sometimes felt advisable, as during the barons’ wars in the mid-13th century, or during the wars of the Roses in the mid-fifteenth century. In that case one applied to the King for a licence to crenellate, or to put it simply, to adapt one’s house to make it to some extent defensible. Such houses are usually termed defended manor houses rather than pure castles, and locally included Codnor, Bretby and Melbourne. There never was a Norman castle at Melbourne. The King had granted Melbourne to the Bishops of Carlisle, a place often made too hot for comfort by marauding Scots, hence the epic scale of the Norman church there. Yet it was not until 1246/1248 that we have evidence for a manor house at Melbourne. In the very beginning of the fourteenth century Sir Robert de Holand, held a manor house there under the ambitious Thomas, Duke of Lancaster of whom he was a leading confidant. He duly obtained a licence to crenellate in 1311 and in 1314 the mason Peter de Bagworth is recorded and undertaking extensive works there, ‘there’ being the area on the SE side of Castle Square at Melbourne, although this work was being done for Lancaster, not Holand himself, that year created a peer by writ of summons. Indeed, whatever arrangement there was between Lord Holand and the Duke, it was clearly intended to enable the former to reap the fiscal benefits of ownership whilst his master retained control of the site. Indeed, this was the year of the disaster at Bannockburn and for the next four years Lancaster was effectively in control of the government. In 1322, however, the King had his revenge, defeating the Duke at Boroughbridge, although, strangely enough, Holand had deserted to the King just prior to the encounter, thus saving his neck. What Holand created was a fortified manor house and he was later confirmed in his possession of the manor of Melbourne, held this time from his former mentor’s younger brother, Henry, Earl of Lancaster, again raised to a dukedom in 1351. The Castle is specifically referred to as such in the documentation generated by his death ten years later. The manor and castle passed by marriage to John of Gaunt, also created Duke of Lancaster, and when his son became Henry IV, his possessions were made into a separate principality, called the Duchy of Lancaster which still owns much land in England and especially in Derbyshire. By this time there was an extensive park, now attached to the Melbourne Hall estate, surrounded by a pale – an earthen bank designed to stop the deer jumping out – still extant in several sections, and equipped with two lodges, one (moated) situated at SK392241 and recorded as in existence from c. 1262 until the late 15th century. There was also a moat and bridge. After Agincourt the castle was developed into a palace-like residence and became the very luxurious PoW camp of the captured Jean, Duc de Bourbon and other notable French prisoners. Poor Duke Jean was there for no less than nineteen years; clearly no one at home was in any hurry to raise his ransom! Their gaoler and the Constable of the Castle was local landed magnate Nicholas Montgomery of Cubley, the younger. It was later granted to Henry V’s French queen after his death in 1422. A drawing of 1602 in the PRO (subsequently rather well engraved in 1733 for the Society of Antiquaries) shows it to have been embowered with something like a dozen round and square section towers, all embattled, the external walls having plentiful slit windows but high up, one or two elaborately traceried Gothic ones too. A pedimented lantern visible in the midst of the pinnacles seems to indicate the position of the great hall and there was an impressive elaborate door with a crocketed ogee moulding above it in the outer wall, compared by Anthony Emery with that at Mackworth (see last month) and presumably the main entrance, reached by the bridge over the moat. Emery also suggests that it must have been built, like Haddon and Wingfield Manor, around two courtyards and points out that the original drawing (rather than the engravings taken from it) clearly suggests this. In its time it must have been most impressive. Yet its apogee was brief and, with the French wars at an end, it swiftly became a white elephant although exactly what it was used for in the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries is not at all clear, but it was still in good repair when the itinerarist John Leland saw it in the early1540s, writing that it was ‘Prety [pretty] and yn meately [very] good reparation.’ Yet under Elizabeth it appears to have become completely redundant. Hence it was referred to in 1576 when it was reported that the castle was in a fair state of decay though the stonework was good. In 1583, it was recommended by the Privy Council that the queen move her cousin, the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, to Melbourne, and a description of the castle was provided which throws interesting light on its appearance at the time in that it was said to be constructed of lead-covered ashlar, had large spacious rooms that would need to be partitioned, floors of earth and plaster, walls that appear to have needed repointing and rendering since they were described as being too easily scaleable, and no paths or wall about
Lost Houses – The Old Mayor’s Parlour
Of all the losses of large houses in Derbyshire one of the most grievous was the completely unnecessary – if not vindictive – demolition of the largest urban timber framed domestic residence in Britain of its date, the Old Mayor’s Parlour, 15 Tenant Street, Derby in 1948. By a cruel irony this was the same year that the first Statutory List for Derby was prepared. Had the building survived a few more months, it would without doubt have been listed grade I. From the 18th century until the late 1930s it was a difficult house to see, for like all houses built in Derby before the modern era, it had to be fitted onto one of the long, narrow and in this case slightly curving burgage plots with which the Saxon burh was laid out in the early 10th century. It was thus end-on to Tenant Street and in c1740 a Georgian house was grafted onto its street front, so you could no longer get a glimpse of its ornamentally timbered north front from the street. It was only when the requirements of the 1929 Derby Central Improvement Plan were being met, that Corporation Street was driven through close by the east end of the house and the surrounding properties were razed, that the house once again became visible. With the coming of war in 1939, the scheme stalled for a decade until peace enabled the Council House to be finished in 1947, after the lifting of building restrictions. The Mayor would have occupied his fine suite of rooms (panelled with oak from freshly demolished Derwent Hall) and looked out of the window across the smart dual carriageway of Corporation Street. One can imagine the elected man of the people, seeing the decaying hulk of the Old Mayor’s Parlour before him, demanding it be cleared away forthwith as an eyesore, despite the undertaking by a predecessor to allow the Derbyshire Archaeological Society to purchase it for a nominal sum for re-erection elsewhere. No doubt ingratiating officers rushed to do His Worship’s bidding, for within weeks this fine old edifice was no more. It was a most terrible waste too, for the site has never subsequently been built upon. How splendid the old building would have looked, fully restored and put to beneficial community use and as a draw for tourists, if only some municipal grandee had not had his head full of the imagined desire of ‘the people’ for universal newness and for the destruction of what one of his colleagues called the ‘worn-out shibboleths of outmoded privilege’! The house itself was described even in the 1880s as ‘a picture more than a place; a ballad rather than a building’. Behind its Georgian street front it stretched over four wide gables containing the attics, with two floors below. The construction was close-studded oak framing with a heavy carved cornice below the gables. Issuing from each end of the façade on the first floor were two astonishing groups of four timber canted oriel windows, flanking a central bay that was almost blank, being lit only by an inconsequential three light mullioned window. On the ground floor each oriel crowned a four light flush mullioned window on the west end of the façade, whilst at the east the lower fenestration was only of three lights. There were no less than four doors, of which one, an impressive double-leafed affair elevated atop a flight of five stone steps, was the original entrance, whilst the others were evidence of the eastern end of the house having been turned into three tenements at an earlier date. This magnificent old town house once bore a date of 1483 which nobody has ever challenged since I first published it in 1987. Inside there was much period and later oak paneling, a massive oak newel staircase and a jolly frieze around part of the first floor landing of Achilles leading the Achaean cavalry against Troy, probably later 17th century in date. The name Old Mayor’s Parlour, is traditional but is only met with in the 19th century, when the house was occupied by various departments of the municipality and actually owned by two mayors. Yet its builder’s name is entirely lost to us, but from its size and magnificence it is likely to have been the town residence of one of the grandest County families, perhaps the Blounts, Lords Mountjoy, seated at Barton Blunt and at this period pre-eminent, but until some documentary evidence is found, we shall never be sure. By the time of the Hearth Tax return for Derby in 1670, the house seems to have been divided into two, with the east end rebuilt with an east facing seven bay two storey brick range under a hipped roof, clearly visible of the 1693 (Sitwell) and 1728 (Bucks’) East Prospects of the town. This part was the home of and was presumably extended by Dr Percival Willoughby (1596-1685) Britain’s first specialist gynaecologist. He was a younger son of the Willoughbys of Wollaton Hall, and had a long career in Derby. Even without his fees, his aristocratic background would have enabled him to fund such an extension. He is buried under a slab in the side aisle of St Peter’s church engraved with his coat of arms. The gardens stretched down to the river where once stood a fishing pavilion and a 19th century author claims that the river at this point was once spanned by a ‘bridge of crazy timbers’ although no confirmation of this bold assertion has ever emerged. It was after Dr Willoughby’s time, c1740 that the street front was rebuilt in Georgian style with a fine interior including a pretty mahogany staircase with two twisted balusters per tread. This was probably when the western part of the old house was adapted as a service wing and the eastern part divided up to make three houses – hence the multiplicity of doors. At some stage in the late 18th century, the building was
