At the end of a long avenue, Burton Agnes Hall presents one of the finest façades of the late Elizabethan age: an artful play of projecting bays and windows, in rose-pink brick, with all the decorative richness concentrated on the entrance. It is a work attributed to the great architect Robert Smythson, built at the turn of the 17th century, on the hinge between the Elizabethan and Jacobean styles.
A prodigy house of 1601-1610
When Sir Henry Griffith (1st Baronet) was called to the Council of the North — the royal government of the northern provinces — he resolved to replace his old manor with a new, fashionable house. Raised from 1601 to 1610 on designs attributed to Robert Smythson (the architect of Longleat, Wollaton and Hardwick), the house is a compact block of brick, flanked with glazed bays, around a small internal courtyard. On the top floor runs a Long Gallery the full length of the house, crowned with a richly worked wagon-vaulted plaster ceiling. The gatehouse, completed around 1610, raises its three storeys and octagonal turrets in front of the façade.
The interior holds marvels. The great hall keeps an extraordinary screen of carved stone and stucco, teeming with allegories — one of the summits of the period's ornament. Above a chimneypiece, an alabaster overmantel depicts the Parable of the Ten Virgins, a composition borrowed from Pieter Bruegel the Elder and spread by Philip Galle's engravings in the 1560s: vivid proof that Flemish and Continental models travelled as far as the manor houses of Yorkshire.
The Norman manor and the new house
Remarkably, the old Norman manor — built around 1173 by Roger de Stuteville — survives right beside the Jacobean house: the two can be visited a few steps apart, five centuries of difference before one's eyes. The Griffith family had been settled there since 1457 (Sir Walter Griffith), and the estate has never left the same line: passed by marriage to the Boyntons and then to their descendants, it is today entrusted to a preservation trust. Burton Agnes also holds a fine collection of paintings and celebrated gardens: the walled garden, dotted with beds laid out as games (chessboard, draughts, snakes and ladders), keeps the National Collection of Campanulas — more than three thousand plant species grow side by side there. Look for: Smythson's bayed façade, the gatehouse of 1610, the carved screen of the great hall, the Bruegel alabaster overmantel, the neighbouring Norman manor, the walled gardens.
Did you know?
Sir Henry Griffith built Burton Agnes because he had just joined the Council of the North. It is a rule of the century: one does not build a prodigy house to live in, but to display a rank just attained. The house is a curriculum vitae in brick; its façade says, to those who can read it, "I now sit on the Council."
Renaissance notes
Burton Agnes Hall lies at Burton Agnes, near Driffield (East Riding of Yorkshire). Its Renaissance interest rests on the house of 1601-1610 attributed to Smythson, its carved screen and its Long Gallery, together with the Norman manor preserved alongside.
Quiz
- To which architect is Burton Agnes Hall attributed?
- Robert Smythson
- Inigo Jones
- Christopher Wren
- What can be seen right beside the Jacobean house?
- The old Norman manor of 1173
- A Roman villa
- A lighthouse
- Which work is the model for the great hall's alabaster overmantel?
- The Parable of the Ten Virgins after Bruegel the Elder
- The Mona Lisa
- Trajan's Column