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In the Buildings of England volume for North-West and South Norfolk, Northwold Manor is described as one of several ‘nice’ houses around the church. The true state of the house can be judged by the fact that it featured on the front cover of the Buildings at Risk Report published in 2010 by the campaigning group SAVE Britain’s Heritage. In his foreword to Northwold Manor Reborn (see ‘Further reading’ below), Ptolemy Dean described it as a magnificent building desperately in need of a loving owner, after having been ‘stuffed to the rafters with old furniture and bric-a-brac, which soaked up the water from the leaking roofs, thereby feeding the dry rot that was fast consuming the building’ and that could have led to its ultimate collapse.
To the rescue came the husband-and-wife team of Warwick Rodwell, an architectural historian and archaeologist well known to CA readers, and Diane Gibbs, museum curator and art conservator. True to the motto that accompanies the Rodwell armorial bearings (Felicitas per ardua: ‘Joy through hard work’), they set about a ten-year ‘restoration saga’. For them, rescuing the house was not just a building project: it was an opportunity to carry out in-depth research into the village, the house, and the families who lived in it down the ages. It was also an opportunity to demonstrate how restoration should be carried out, by contrast with what Warwick characterises as ‘the shameful level of destruction that takes place in the name of restoration promoted by popular television programmes’.
Northwold and its manors
Northwold is a typical East Anglian linear village, with the majority of its properties constructed at intervals along a winding road once known simply as ‘The Street’, ‘Main Street’, or ‘High Street’. Early maps show numerous small fields, orchards, and gardens separating the houses, many of them built upon in the 19th century to produce a denser streetscape. The ambitious four-stage west tower of the church of St Andrew, built using bequests dating from 1465 to 1482, dominates the village skyline, and the Manor House stands directly opposite.
Manors are defined simply as an area of land. Though manors came to be associated with the advowson of the church (the right to appoint the parish priest, subject to the bishop’s approval), there is no simple link between a parish, a church, and a manor: some parishes had multiple manors and some manors encompassed more than one parish. Manors could be bought and sold (in founding St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 1473, Robert Woodlark bought the manor of Coton to produce rental income for his foundation and to furnish timber and stone for the building) and they could be given to a religious institution as an endowment, often in return for perpetual prayers for the donor.
The majority of the properties in medieval Northwold fell within the jurisdiction of one of three manors: Dageney’s (which took its name from Roger Dakeney, who is recorded as possessing it in 1274); Hovell’s (where William de Haville is recorded as holding the lordship in 1315); and Northwold (which was held by the Bishops of Ely in the later Middle Ages). The first two manors were combined in the mid-15th century to form the manor of Hovell’s and Dageney’s, and the Partridge family had acquired the lordship of all three by the 18th century. The lordship of Northwold then passed down the Partridge family until 1937, but the subsequent history remains to be elucidated.
Northwold Manor in 2010 (top) and in 2020 (above) showing the central five-bay house, dating from the 16th or 17th century. It was Georgianised in the 1760s with the insertion of sash windows and front railings, then the Regency porch and west wing were built in 1814 as a suite of grand rooms for impressing guests. Photo: Matthew Andrews (top).
Manor houses varied in character and scale. Northwold Manor was probably managed by a resident bailiff on behalf of the Ely bishops, with a relatively modest dwelling surrounded by functional barns and granaries, byres, and stables. Some manor houses served as residences for their secular or ecclesiastical owners, and could be constructed on a grander scale as a base for hunting and entertaining, like nearby Oxburgh Hall (now owned by the National Trust; see CA 367), built as a moated pseudo-castle by Sir Edmund Bedingfield c.1482.
Warwick reveals at the end of his first chapter tracing the history of the village that none of the previous owners of Northwold Manor was ever the lord of any of Northwold’s three manors, and he has found no archaeological evidence for a medieval structure on the site of the present property. It lacks an adjacent farmyard or any of the agricultural buildings that one would expect of a manorial demesne. Previously it was known as the Mansion House, and the mystery of why it is now called Northwold Manor ‘has so far eluded detection’. Perhaps it was simply a courtesy title afforded to a building of undoubted scale, opulence, and character long after the real location of the manor house was forgotten – Kelmscott Manor, William Morris’ Oxfordshire home, is another example of this phenomenon.
It is possible that the medieval Northwold Manor stood on the site of the former rectory, now named ‘The Grange’, which lies to the north and east of the church. If so, it reflects the practice from the Tudor period onwards whereby many manor houses parted company with the churches with which they were once in a close-knit relationship. A new house would be constructed at some remove from the church, where it could command an attractive setting in the landscape, while the redundant manor house would then be converted into a rectory. If so, a possible candidate for the ‘new’ manor is Hall Farm, a substantial stone-built house located at the far western end of the village, probably late 16th-century in origin and surrounded by a fine group of 17th- and 18th-century barns.
The best candidate for the second manor – Dageney’s – is Manor Farm, which lies 600m north-west of the church, and was called the Manor House in 1787, when it was owned by Henry Partridge III, by then lord of all three Northwold manors. Though dated 1635 on the main range and 1807 on a rear wing, the house encapsulates the remains of a timber aisled hall, suggesting a substantial medieval residence.
A medieval moated site in Hovell’s Lane at the eastern end of the village must have been the initial seat of the third manor. Prominent earthworks are shown on Ordnance Survey maps; these were levelled when the village playing field was laid out, but the site still has major archaeological significance. A contender for the successor residence is Waterloo Farm, now Waterloo House, of 16th-century origin, standing at the corner of Hovell’s Lane and the High Street.
Northwold Manor’s architectural history
Warwick has great fun revealing the inaccuracy of the official list description for Northwold Manor, compiled in 1951, though now given a much fuller description thanks to his request for a formal review in 2022 that led to its designation being upgraded from Grade II to II*. The earliest structure on the site is a largely timber-framed building, ‘bookended’ by stone gables, a hybrid form of construction common enough in East Anglia where good building stone is lacking. A fireplace of Tudor brick, supporting a massive bressummer of elm that spans the hearth opening, points to a date in the 15th or early 16th century.
It is likely that this structure was secondary to a larger timber-framed house of the same date, as evidenced by the foundation wall of mortared flint attached to the eastern end of that building which probably supported a stair turret. A candidate for the ownership of this property is Robert Blake, parish priest of Oxborough, who is recorded in 1503 as having given ‘all his lands in Northwold to repair that church for ever’. A subsequent owner, Richard Carter II, says in his will that his house was formerly known as ‘Blake’s’, and was bought by his late father, Richard Carter I, from Robert Reymond, gentleman.
Blake’s house was replaced by today’s central block, a brick house of five bays, of two main floors, plus attic and cellars. A number of large bricks ‘of notably coarse manufacture with pronounced grass and straw markings on the underside’, ranging in colour from dark red to brown, grey, and purple, with some clinkered and distorted examples, were used in the construction. These are Flemish-made bricks known from other East Anglian sites but dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. In the absence of independent dating evidence, Warwick speculates that Robert Reymond bought and demolished Blake’s, reusing some of its bricks, before selling the new five-bay block to Richard Carter I in the late 1650s or early 1660s.
This house was next extended to the west in 1714 with a reception room of red brick, now known only from the excavated foundations, fragments of good-quality moulded plaster, and a date stone that once occupied the apex of the gable. The stone is inscribed RTC 1714, recording the name of the owner (Richard Thomas Carter), and is interesting because it was cut from a 13th-century pier moulding contemporary with the masonry in the parish church and of the same Barnack limestone.
Seven years later, sash windows were inserted to replace the former mullion-and-transomed casement windows in a campaign to ‘Georgianise’ the entire ensemble, with new interior panelling of green-painted pine. A joiner who worked on the panelling painted his initials and date – RR 1722 – on one of the bricks, and date panels set in the east and west gables of the house are inscribed TC 1721 (for Thomas Carter), thus dating this phase.
After another 40 years, between 1760 and 1770, the front elevation windows were changed again to provide sashes with much thinner glazing bars; the front door was given its delicately detailed six- vaned fanlight. Also surviving from this period are fragments of the fine wallpapers with which the principal rooms were decorated. At this stage, too, the symmetrical façade was given a portico with limestone columns and the house front, set back from the street, was further enhanced by elegant railings set on a limestone plinth.
Those columns were then moved to a new entrance porch that was created when the 1714 wing was replaced by a suite of even grander rooms. The boldly thrusting two-storeyed porch has a cast-iron date plaque (AD 1814). The same date is carved into the Baltic pine of the roof trusses, naming T Harvey (the client), I Carter (the intended heir to the property), and T Clarkson (the builder or carpenter). With its spacious entrance hall, flanked by fine reception rooms, and a delicate cantilevered staircase, the new wing was designed to dominate the High Street and to impress visitors and passers-by. It reflects the aspirations of owners Thomas and Hannah Harvey (who inherited the house from John Carter IV in 1799) as they moved up the social scale, making a claim for the newly named ‘Mansion House’ to be the most impressive property in the parish.
The house perhaps reached its zenith in 1858, when George West made a visit to ‘Squire Carter’s Mansion’ (the heirs of the Harveys incorporated the Carter name) and described in verse its ‘many great comforts’ and ‘rooms large and lofty, well furnish’d’ with ‘things very beautiful’ including ‘stuff’d birds in neat cases’ and ‘many good pictures’ that displayed the talents of the Miss Carters.
Numerous piecemeal alterations and subdivisions subsequently took place, including the provision of lavatories and bathrooms and kitchens, but in 1919 the Carter family’s long association with the house ended when it was sold to the Fendicks, a local farming family.
Twentieth-century decline
Nobody lived in the house after 1955, leaving the buildings unattended and falling prey to vandalism and decay. Warwick gives a detailed account of the subsequent struggle to persuade the eccentric owners to do something about a house that, with its 200ft-long frontage standing opposite the church, was causing huge concern to the local community. He refers to a moulded concrete plaque bearing the face of a Green Man and the inscription ‘Restored 1986’ – a misleadingly premature proclamation that signalled an intention that was never fulfilled.
Those owners did not give up the property readily, however, with many a court case and legal challenge in response to the serving of a compulsory purchase order by the local authority (and what reads suspiciously like a last-minute arson attempt). One can only admire the determination of the new owners to go ahead with the purchase and their ability to see potential in the house, when many others would have walked away. (Indeed, at one stage, Warwick says ‘we would never have bought the property if we had any inkling that such a saga would unfold’.)
But buy it they did, and as one turns the pages of Northwold Manor Reborn, one witnesses the almost miraculous transformation of the house from collapsed structures covered in rank vegetation to a home of enviable character and beauty. Every intervention is explained and evidenced, from the details of 18th-century latches to the construction of a new study block and library, on the footprint of a long-gone orangery. Fitted with oak book presses of 1841 ‘ejected from Queen’s College Library’ and oak-block flooring form Greenwich Royal Naval College, the Library is served by an octagonal stair turret topped by a belvedere and incorporating a 7m-long flagpole bought at an architectural salvage auction.
Looking back, Warwick reflects on what might have happened to the house had he and Diane not purchased it. Most potential buyers would have been put off by the knowledge that the cost of sympathetic restoration would far outstrip its saleable value. A developer would have eventually acquired the property and gutted the interior to create multiple units, shorn of historic details that would have been deemed as being incompatible with current fire regulations.
To the question ‘would you feature the Manor in a televised “makeover” programme?’, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. Warwick has enough experience of ‘old house’ TV productions to know that they are made to a formula, involving marital discord, belligerent contractors, financial crises, and obstructive officials. Producers do not want a coherent account of a historic building, revealing how it is investigated, studied, and restored. Instead, says Warwick, we offer you this book, describing ‘the saga of saving Northwold Manor’, and showing that ‘even the most apparently hopeless building is not beyond being rescued and transformed from a derelict pile into a delightful home’.
Further reading:
Warwick Rodwell with Diane Gibbs, Northwold Manor Reborn: architecture, archaeology and restoration of a derelict Norfolk house (Oxbow, ISBN 979-8888571347, £55).
All images: Warwick Rodwell, unless otherwise stated
