Doddington Hall: The story of an Elizabethan marvel

On November 26, 1607, the parson of Doddington succinctly noted the burial of ‘Mr Thomas Tailor’ in the parish register. No monument was subsequently raised to his memory, but, arguably, none was needed because Tailor has a spectacular architectural memorial. Overshadowing the church in which his funeral service was read is the house he built, Doddington Hall. Outwardly, its warm brick exterior detailed with stone would still be immediately recognisable to him. The interiors of the house, however, have been transformed over time. Not only were the principal rooms redecorated in the 18th century, but, over the past two decades, both the house and the wider estate have undergone an imaginative and trailblazing renewal.

For someone with the wealth to build Doddington, Tailor is a surprisingly shadowy figure, the events of his early life masked by a common name. Both his parentage and the date of his birth are unknown, nor did he possess a coat of arms, a distinguishing mark of Elizabethan gentility. His first wife, Bridgit, whom he married in 1550, was already twice widowed and well-connected both within the city and county of Lincoln. She died two years later and Thomas seems to have supported his stepchildren with what one described in their will as ‘wonderful friendship’. Ten years later, in 1562, he married again to Jane Hollingworth, the daughter of a mayor and draper of Lincoln. After a gap of six years — possibly she was very young at the time of her marriage — they had five children, all of them baptised in St Martin’s Church, Lincoln.

By 1571, Tailor was acting as a public notary, which suggests a legal training, and, in 1580–83, he copied out in his own hand the official record of the visitation of the diocese of Lincoln by the reforming Bishop, John Cooper. It was almost certainly his official involvement with the vast see of Lincoln that allowed him to begin acquiring land, but quite where the money came from is not clear. The transfers of property brought about by the Reformation and the ongoing despoliation of the bishopric probably played a part. Whatever the case, among the manors he secured was Doddington, which he jointly purchased in 1593 for the massive sum of £4,850 and in complex circumstances.

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

Doddington is mentioned in Domesday as a possession of Westminster Abbey. That connection continued until the 1540s, but, in the meantime, it was held by the Picot and Burgh families. Their manor house probably stood on the site of the present hall. William, 4th Lord Burgh, sold the property in 1586, at which time the new owner, John Savile, disposed of one part of the manor. Its purchaser, George Anton, subsequently became MP for Lincoln, the Recorder of the city and a son-in-law of Thomas Tailor. In the 1593 purchase, therefore, Tailor acted in concert not only with George Anton, but his brother-in-law, Leon Hollingworth, another notary involved in the 1580 Lincoln visitation, Henry Christofer, and his 14-year-old son and heir, another Thomas.

This last inclusion strongly implies that the elder Thomas was planning to make Doddington a dynastic seat, although he didn’t immediately buy out his fellow owners. Moreover, given that he must have been at least in his mid sixties by the time of the purchase, he was surely keen to get on with building it at once. No documentation survives recording the work, but repairs to the roof in 1858 revealed a ‘leaden plate, with the initials I. W. and the date 1600… on the top of the central cupola’. It is not clear who the initials refer to, but if the roof was structurally complete by this date it seems reasonable to assume that the foundation stone was laid in about 1595.

By tradition, the brick used to build the house was made on site. Using this material may have been an economy, but the locality also has excellent stone readily available. The use of brick, in other words, may equally have been an aesthetic choice, its warm colour intended to contrast attractively with the cut masonry detailing of the windows, doors and quoins. This combination of materials, popularised by royal building projects of the early 15th century, became a commonplace of Tudor fine architecture.

Doddington is a compactly planned building that integrates all the rooms necessary for grand domestic living into a coherent and symmetrical structure. It comprises a central block of three storeys that is bookended to either side by cross ranges of the same height. A regular grid of windows extends around the whole building, accentuating the regularity of the design. Substantial chimneystacks rise up the outer walls (Fig 5) and, originally, the parapets were punctuated by small semi-circular gables. The main approach to the house is enclosed within a walled forecourt entered through a gatehouse, creating a domesticated castle. The front and back are close images of each other, but the former (Fig 1) incorporates three square turrets, two at the angles between the main block and the flanking ranges, and a central porch.

One turret incorporates a service stair. Around the porch door is a modest flourish of Classical detailing, practically the only ornament on the strikingly austere exterior. Where the three turrets rise above the parapets, they are surmounted by domed chambers accessible from the leads of the roof. Two of these — the third is a stair — undoubtedly served as banqueting houses, where guests could retire to enjoy delicacies and the views. From this vantage point, Lincoln Cathedral breaks the horizon six miles away (Fig 4). Visible in the opposite direction is the 19th-century spire of Harby, Nottinghamshire, the manor in which Edward I’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, died in 1290.

Passing through the front door, the modern visitor is transported into an early Georgian interior (Fig 2). Ignoring this decoration, however, the essential configuration of Elizabethan rooms remains. The hall extends to the right of the entrance and, at the far end of the room — the former site of the dais for the high table — a door gives access to a great stair. The Elizabethan predecessor of the present stair rose the full height of the building and connected the hall to a great chamber and long gallery on the two floors above. It also gave access to the withdrawing rooms and bedrooms (Fig 6) that occupy both cross ranges. At ground level to the left of the front porch were the kitchen and services.

The plan of the house is conventional, but the discipline of the design, as well as its height and austerity, can be paralleled in the buildings by the celebrated Elizabethan architect Robert Smythson; in particular, with the much larger house Smyth-son created for George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, at Worksop Manor in the 1580s. Whether he designed Doddington, however, is an open question. Tailor had plenty of connections with London and might equally have requested an architect or surveyor within the orbit of the Court and the City to supply him with plans for his house. A local mason would then have realised the design.

This was common practice at the time. John Thorpe, for example, a London-based surveyor, supplied plans for Vincent Skinner, the secretary of Lord Burghley, to build a new seat at Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire, in about 1607. Thorpe’s surviving collection of architectural drawings also includes an elevation and plan for a compact house loosely resembling Doddington at Noseley, Leicestershire, probably of 1604. These projects, however, and most of the other buildings comparable to Doddington, including Quenby Hall, Leicestershire, date to the early 17th century. Assuming Doddington was begun in the 1590s, Smythson’s buildings are its most likely source of inspiration.

Tailor died in 1607 a wealthy man with an estate of more than 9,000 acres in Lincolnshire. His businesslike will directs the partial cancellation and redistribution of large debts, including one of £1,300 transferred to his grand-daughter and eventual heir, Elizabeth Anton. It was his son and namesake, however, who immediately inherited the property. Little is known about Thomas the younger, but he was long lived and, generations later, stories — possibly invented — circulated about his eccentricity and practical jokes. He was in his sixties when the Civil War broke out and seems to have taken no part in the hostilities. Remarkably, there is no record of Dodding-ton being looted or damaged.

In the meantime, Elizabeth Anton married Sir Edward Hussey, the head of another local gentry family with its seat at Honington. He was created a baronet in 1611 and with his entire family entered energetically into the Royalist cause in the 1640s. His loyalty came at a high price. He lost a brother at Newark and a son, John, at the Battle of Gainsborough. John’s armour — a buff coat and pikeman’s cuirass — pierced by a musket ball survives at Doddington (Country House treasures, January 28). He was subsequently made liable for a massive fine of £8,750, but died in 1648 before it was fully paid.

When Elizabeth, Lady Hussey, came into her Doddington inheritance as a widow in 1652, the estate offered both a means of settling her financial affairs and an independent seat. Despite residing in the house, at her death in 1658 she requested burial with her husband at Honington. This established a family pattern that has left Doddington church curiously bereft of monuments.

Doddington passed directly from Lady Hussey to her grandson, Sir Thomas Hussey, who was only 19 when he entered into the estate. His income of about £2,500 a year guaranteed him a leading role in local affairs. He welcomed the Restoration in 1660 and served as an MP from 1681. His Tory sympathies made him slow to offer support to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that brought William and Mary to the throne. They may also explain why he didn’t rebuild Doddington, but preserved the Elizabethan house until his death in 1706.

It’s hard to reconstruct the house interior as Sir Thomas knew it, but the so-called Brown Parlour at the head of the hall with its fine panelling of about 1700 is presumably his (Fig 7). The garden setting of the house, meanwhile, is depicted in an engraving from Britannia Illustrata (1707). It shows the building at the heart of a patchwork of walled compartments (Fig 3) with stable and service courts to one side and gardens to the other. There are also axial views planted with avenues to the front and rear.

During the early 18th century, the estate passed twice through the female line, first through Sir Thomas’s daughter, Sarah, to her husband, Robert Apreece, of Washingley Hall, Huntingdonshire (confusingly, Sarah’s sister, Elizabeth, occupied the house for a period and with her husband, Richard Ellys, made minor alterations to it; the Brown Parlour might also be theirs). Then, in 1749, it was transferred through Sarah’s daughter, Rhoda, to her husband, Francis Blake Delaval.

Francis, who began his career in the Royal Navy, had already inherited two large estates in Northumberland, Ford Castle from his maternal grandfather in 1718 and Seaton Delaval in 1723, from his uncle. The latter brought with it the liability of a vast new house begun by Vanbrugh in 1720 and still in the early stages of construction. Rhoda’s hand and fortune, secured in 1724, were probably decisive in allowing him to continue this building.

Francis died after falling down the steps of his still-incomplete new house in 1752 and Seaton Delaval passed to the couple’s notoriously profligate eldest son, Sir Francis. Rhoda, however, kept hold of Doddington as a widow and an inventory of the house made on January 16, 1753, shows that the building was well furnished. It also names her bedroom within it, implying that she regularly resided there.

In 1759, Rhoda bequeathed the property to her second son, John, who was already effectively running the family’s affairs. John changed his name to Hussey Delaval in acknowledgement of her inheritance and, the following year, began modernising the house. His work was not only grandly conceived, but shows an intriguing sensitivity towards the history of the building, as we will discover next week.

Find out more at the Doddington Hall website.

This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.