Lawkland Hall – A History by Emmeline Garnett
Fine old houses of the size and quality of Lawkland Hall are a rarity in the area: it is interesting to note, therefore, how relatively little-known Lawkland is, and, if we go back into its history, what a low profile it has kept for a long time. I am not sure that it is possible to discover exactly why this should be so - religion may have had a part to play and later, when religion was no longer important, the family which held it through eleven generations may simply have learnt to keep their heads modestly down, and lost ambition to shine in the world. Whittaker in his Richmondshire (1823) is almost dismissive - ‘a spacious and respectable hall house, of which part may seem to be as old as the purchase of the estate by the Inglebies, and the rest about the time of James I.’ Speight’s Craven and North-West Yorkshire Highlands (1892) gives more information, extending to a page and a half, but makes errors, notably in adding age to the place. He attributes the ‘massive central square tower’ to the time of Henry VIII, whereas the top at least is an 18th century addition. The north front he calls Elizabethan. He seems to have been inside the house but failed to notice the 1679 datestone. Pevsner never got there at all, and relied on the National Buildings Record for a terse line of non-information - ‘Lshaped, with mullioned and transomed windows and a tower in the re-entrant angle’. It has to be admitted that part of the trouble stems from the many internal reworkings which the house has had, causing it to lose its architectural and historical integrity and become a collection of interesting pieces, extremely difficult to interpret. This is not true however, of the outside, particularly the north front which is the first view from the road and which, in spite of changes to windows, has a fine and coherent character. The early history is faithfully repeated by succeeding writers, none of whom quote their sources. With that caveat, it is repeated here. The first hall on the site is said to have been built by the
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Yorke family at some mediaeval date unknown. Peter Yorke of Middlesmoor, Co. York, was governor of Leith in Scotland in the time of Edward VI, and one of ten sons, it is said, of Sir John Yorke, who had also found time to be Lord Mayor of London, presumably having made a fortune in trade. Peter was the eldest son, and married the daughter of Sir William Ingleby of Ripley Castle. Whether he built (or more probably rebuilt, since such a prime site would hardly be on an unused green field) Lawkland, or had inherited it as part of his patrimony, is not recorded. The purchase included the Manor of Lawkland, and he sold it, to his nephew according to some sources, to his uncle according to others, or possibly to his brother-in-law. The relationship is obscure, but the buyer is identified as John Ingleby, second son of Ingleby of Ripley. The date was about 1572, and at the same time Ingleby bought from Yorke the manor house and demesne lands of Austwick. The price for house and land together was £500, it is said. The main part of Austwick was sold at the same time to the Shuttleworth family. John Ingleby was obviously setting himself up in the world, possibly with his share of London-based money from his father. It was, of course, a very good time for investing in property, as the dissolution of the monasteries, thirty years before, had put vast amounts of church land into the melting pot, and busy entrepreneurs were making great profits. Lawkland by itself was not enough for the ambitious John Ingleby. After his marriage to Anne, the daughter of William Clapham of Beamsley, he also bought from his father-in-law the manor of Clapham, with its manor house at Clapdale, sometimes called Clapdale Castle. In the seventeenth century the antiquary described this rather pompously as ‘A great old castle, joyning on Clapham, the ancient demesne of the family of Clapham, who have lived here in good reputation till our fathers’ days’. But it was in fact only a small fortified manor-house with immensely thick walls. These acquisitions established John Ingleby as an important landowner in the area. He also at some time bought a place in County Durham, Hutton in Rudby, but although he himself was buried there, it was probably too far away to be very practical, and the family disposed of it not long after his death. It is disappointing that we know so little about the Ingleby family and their activities. These may in any case have been low-key because of their religion. John Ingleby had hardly established his small empire before the threat of Spanish invasion and the enthusiastic activities of the Jesuits focussed suspicion on the homegrown Catholics and gave them a high profile which many of them would willingly have done without. The remoter parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire were tolerably safe havens because there simply were not enough convinced Protestants of the right social standing to provide Justices of the Peace. Many were themselves covert Catholics or at least very unwilling to shop their relatives, friends and neighbours. Nevertheless, at some time the Ingleby’s thought it worth while to construct a priest hole within a very large chimney stack which led to a row of false chimneys on the roof. It seems uncertain whether they were so constructed, or altered, probably the latter. The hole itself is, by comparison with many others, singularly cramped and uncomfortable. Whether it was ever used is not known: no stories of searches, successful or unsuccessful, have come down. Nor is it known who built it, though the work has been compared with that of the famous priest-hole constructor, Nicholas Owen, who was caught and executed in 1606. 2
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All that can be said for certain is that although the extant records of Clapham parish church start in 1595; the Ingleby’s did not use the church for christenings, marriages or burials for the first fifty years of their residence. The first John is said to have died in 1608 and to have left a will, which has not been found. His son Thomas is said to have died in 1622, and his son John in 1648, but none of them is registered as buried in Clapham, although Speight says very precisely of Thomas that he was ‘buried on Easter Day in the north aisle of Clapham Church’ I have no idea where he got this information: Whittaker quotes some old inscriptions inside the church before it was modernised, but none of them refers to the Ingleby’s. What we do know from the family tree, which has come down from the main branch of the family at Ripley, is that for several generations in the matter of their marriages they were in the upper social echelons, where marriages tended to be dynastic rather than a matter of liking between neighbours. It has already been noted that by his marriage to Ann Clapham the first John was in a position to double the size of his estates by purchase from his father-in-law. Thomas (15641622) married Alice Lawson daughter of Sir Ralph Lawson of Brough. John (d. 1648) married first Margaret Towneley of the ancient family of Royle Hall, Burnley, and secondly Mary Lake said to be of Middlesex. Clearly whatever difficulties they laboured under because of their religion, these did not prevent the kind of country-wide communications enjoyed by others of the same social standing. In the seventeenth century (the first entry is of 1632), they began to use the church at Clapham. We can only speculate about what this means, what arrangements they came to with the incumbent, or their consciences. John (d. 1648) had his last three children, Arthur, Columbus and Charles, christened in the church, and from then on they had clearly reached a modus vivendi which may have saved them from the worst of punishing fines, but of course still left them in difficulties over education and public service. It would be intriguing to know whether they managed still to be Justices of the Peace, as their social status demanded, or whether, like some of their fellow Catholics, they attended the statutory church services with their eyes shut and cotton stuffed into their ears! On the one hand they had a relationship with the local Protestant church, but they also had strong and enduring links with Catholicism. Isabel, the daughter of John (d.1648) by his wife Margaret Towneley, for instance, married Richard Sherburne of Stonyhurst, of a fiercely recusant family. One of John’s granddaughters, Alethea Ingleby, was a nun in the English monastery in Liege, and in the 18th century his great granddaughter Isabel was Lady Abbess at Cambrai. Being a Catholic was a very much less cut-and-dried affair than seems to be indicated by, for instance, the discovery of a priest’s hole. The probate documents of Mary Ingleby, who died in 1667, surviving her husband John by twenty years, are fascinating. Her son Arthur, the natural heir, was living at Clapdale, which had come to be used as the family’s second house, Austwick Hall being the third. Arthur would by custom inherit the estate, but somewhat unusually, Mary had the disposal of the whole contents of the house. The will itself is the barest of documents, simply leaving all she possessed between her two younger sons, the important document being the inventory, which room by room goes through 3
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old Lawkland Hall, the Hall as it had been refurbished by the first Ingleby nearly a hundred years before. The rooms listed are: Her owne Chamber, Colonel Thomson’s Chamber, Columbus Chamber, the Servants Chambers, the Yallow Chamber, the West Chamber, the Great Chamber, the Little Parlour, the Greate Parlour, the Kitchen. The last three are definitely on the ground floor, but clearly so must some of the chambers be. If the apprisers were walking round the house, which one would expect, it is possible that they started on the ground floor with the West Chamber, and ended the ground floor with the kitchen. This would leave approximately the same number of rooms upstairs and down. The best architectural appraisal of the present building is too vague about what exactly was done in 1679 to make speculation very profitable. What is interesting is the picture we get of the house, finely and completely furnished by the standards of the time, with luxuries that it would take another two hundred years to introduce into the surrounding farmhouses. By far the best-furnished room was ‘her own chamber’, with a large well-furnished bed for herself and a ‘trundle bedstead for her maid’. One feels that she lived here: ‘one table, one chest, one little Cubbard, one Cloth press and a litle table, one Cabinett, one deske, twoo trunckes, one glass case and the bottles in itt, windowe hangings and one looking glasse with one payre of Bellowes and one Chaire.’ This was clearly the heart of the old lady’s empire: a fireplace to keep it warm, her desk to do the work of the house and farm and keep her papers, two trunks for important things, possibly the estate deeds, a ‘Cloth presse’ for her wardrobe. The ‘glass case and the bottles in it’ are intriguing. Were these decorative? More likely, I think, the household store of strong liquor and perhaps medicines, under her eye. One might have expected that like the West Chamber, hers would have been provided with a ‘close stoull and pan’. The fact that it is not suggests that there was a garderobe turret very close by, which probably enables us to position this chamber with fair accuracy. In her survey Barbara Hutton expresses some surprise that ‘there seems to be no sign of a garderobe for the west wing’- hence perhaps the need for a close stool. One could study and speculate about this inventory for many hours. I will only add two things which seem to me of special interest. One is that we can work out which rooms had fireplaces: only five years later, in 1672, before he undertook his wholesale improvements to the house, Arthur Ingleby paid tax on four hearths. This is rather few for a house of this size and standing in the seventeenth century, suggesting that it had not been modernised at all for a long time, perhaps the full hundred years since its acquisition. There was clearly one hearth in Mary Ingleby’s chamber, since a pair of bellows is mentioned, and another in the little parlour, which possesses a ‘fire shoolve’. Obviously there must have been one in the kitchen, and I would hazard a guess that what is called ‘the great chamber’ was on the ground floor, and had once been the central hall, with the main hearth of the house. The other interesting point is - who was Colonel Thomson? He and Columbus, the unmarried son, had small rooms next to each other. Both of them had the bare necessities and no more. Mary Ingleby had been widowed for twenty years. Was ‘Colonel Thomson’ (clearly an inmate, or a very 4
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frequent visitor) her confidential agent, or could this be the disguise of a resident priest? Were these the two rooms at the top of the stairs on the second floor? If Colonel Thomson’s room doubled as a chapel, all the religious items may have been stored in the thickness of the wall above the priest hole. Nothing is mentioned in the inventory, but there must have been some religious items somewhere in the house. Another thought is that they might have been in the ‘twoo trunks’ kept in the widow’s bedroom under her personal supervision. Arthur Ingleby moved on his mother’s death from Clapdale to Lawkland with his wife. They had been married thirteen years but had no children. Columbus, either then or upon his marriage, took over Clapdale. The third son Charles had been educated for the law. He was admitted to Grays Inn in 1663 and called to the Bar in 1671. He married Alethea Eyston of a well-known Catholic family with connections to Sir Thomas More, and himself got into trouble for his religion, spending some time in jail accused of complicity in a Catholic plot. James II, himself a Catholic, knighted and promoted him to Baron of the Exchequer, but under William and Mary he was fined for refusing the oath of allegiance. Although his political and professional career centred on London, he must have spent time in Yorkshire, five of his children being christened at Clapham, where he himself died and was buried in 1719. Meanwhile the elder brother Arthur of Lawkland Hall had died in 1701, leaving a fairly modest amount of money. He had not however been a poor man, having rebuilt Lawkland Hall very thoroughly in 1679, as the datestone shows. The rooms in Arthur’s inventory show a much enlarged house: hall, parlour, yellow chamber, parlour chamber, passage chamber, maids chamber, kitchen chamber, paystery chamber, passage, little passage chamber, James Jackson’s chamber, high passage chamber, brewhouse chamber, Roger’s chamber, meal chamber, back kitchen. It is noticeable that the new house has many more service rooms than the old one, in fact more rooms ‘behind the green baize door’ than in front. This fits with Barbara Hutton’s conclusion that the ‘service range’ behind the main house on the east side, ‘probably dates from the late 17th century and was built in the style of an ordinary farmhouse with a central entrance and perhaps two large rooms as bakehouse and brewhouse, each with a big fireplace and chimney.’ Having no children, Arthur left his estate to his nephew John, son of his brother Columbus, who had married the daughter of William Bradshaugh of Bishop Middleton and with her had acquired the very handsome marriage settlement of £1000, with £1200 more to come upon the death of her father. In his will, Arthur detailed his land holdings which were considerable: the Manor of Thorp-upon -Tees, land in the parish of Wycliffe, and nearer home parts of the townships of Lawkland, Feizor, Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth, Keasden. His will was very generous to his dependents, giving his servants three years’ wages, and leaving 20s. per annum for a schoolmaster at Eldroth Chapel, three poor scholars to be nominated by the owners of Lawkland Hall to be educated gratis. ‘My servant Roger Cansfield’ (his personal servant, who lived in the house) was to have an annuity of £3, and ‘my servant James Jackson’, who also had a room in the house, to have the large sum of £30. James Jackson was probably his clerk or bailiff, and from the parish register it looks as though he may have used his windfall to marry and start a family. 5
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John Ingleby was at Lawkland until his death in 1743, and made further improvements on his own account. Speight says that the drawing room ceiling was decorated with the arms of Ingleby impaling Bradshaugh. Only three of his seven children seem to have reached maturity, and they had no descendants. Isabel became a nun at Cambrai, John Stephen the youngest (1716-1789) and Margery Ann, the eldest ((1702-1783) kept house together at Lawkland Hall. A list of ‘Papists or reputed Papists’ collected by the church authorities in 1767 shows that also in the house was James LeGrand, ‘reputed priest’. He lived in the house but although there were still difficulties in the way of Catholics these were no longer the severe penalties that once they had been. It is often repeated that about this time the Ingleby family abandoned Catholicism finally and so moved the chapel from their house to a small purpose-built chapel in the township. This act of generosity to their neighbours does not read to me as though they had become convinced Protestants. Barbara Hutton’s report dates this move to 1756, but the Catholic baptismal registers begin in 1745, and I have seen the move dated as late as 1790. The list previously quoted shows 58 Catholics living in the parish of Clapham in 1767. I should have thought that the problems of all those pairs of boots Sunday by Sunday on the stairs, not to mention the impossibility of fitting more than a fraction of these people into the tiny second-floor chapel, made the building of the new chapel a piece of common sense. John Stephen enjoyed building, and the abandonment of the semi-public chapel on the second floor may well have gone hand in hand with his improvements to the house itself, which are dated by a carved date in the rooftop gazebo of 1758. It may have been he, or possibly his father, who put in a new handsome staircase. He was certainly responsible for improvements in the windows and for re-roofing the west wing. Barbara Hutton reports a rainwater head dated 1776. Possibly the magnificent 42-rung ladder which remains in an outbuilding belongs to this period - the gutters and the jackdaws’ nests would have needed clearing from time to time. It is a real curiosity - one side at least appears to be made from a single piece of wood, not a thing easily to be found in the neighbourhood. It is noticeable that with the passage of years the Ingleby’s slid down the social scale. They were no longer making marriages across several counties, but linking up with their neighbours. Three succeeding generations in the eighteenth century looked no further for their wives than Kilnsey, Westhouse and Stainforth. They seem to have lived very quiet lives. Eldest sons inherited the estate of some 500 acres; younger sons became attorneys or parsons. The house, it would seem, decayed gently with the fortunes of its owners: there are no obvious improvements after John Stephen’s death in 1789. An interesting map has survived from 1780, an offshoot of the canal mania which gripped the country, showing a planned canal ‘from Parkfoot Bridge to Settle’ winding its way between Settle and Ingleton and passing through Lawkland, as far as one can see through property belonging to the Hall, and involving a considerable tunnel to link the Wenning and Ribble valleys. If anything had come of this scheme, it is interesting to speculate as to what effect it might have had on the fortunes of Lawkland Hall. The last Ingleby’s to live in the house were Thomas and his wife Margaret. He died in 1846 in his fifties. She continued there until her death in 1852. The census return of 1851 shows her alone with two servant girls, a farm man and a groom. She had one son, Christopher, a young solicitor, 6
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recently married, who lived at that time in a cottage in Austwick village. (An elder son, Thomas, died as a young man after his father but before his mother). Christopher inherited on his mother’s death but clearly did not wish to live in the big house. Probably his career precluded it. Instead his sister Anne, married to John William Foster, one of a prosperous yeoman family from Clapham who had made money from farming and cattle trading, moved in with their three children. In 1861 they were there with four indoor, and two outdoor, servants. It is fair to guess that Mr. Foster was proud of the added status conferred by dwelling at Lawkland Hall, because in the 1871 census he designates himself ‘Deputy Lieutenant and landowner.’ Deputy Lieutenant is a modest honour, but hardly an occupation, and unless he had other land, he was not a land owner, but the tenant of his nephew Christopher. Why they moved away has not been discovered, quite possibly Mr Foster died. The 1881 and 1891 census returns show the occupants to be the family of Bernard Watkins, a parson not without money who retired comfortably early from Treeton near Rotherham. His wife was 24 years younger than he was, and they had eight children, moving to Lawkland in 1878 or 1879. To service this large family, which in 1881 ranged from Gertrude aged 15 to a baby; they employed eight female servants - governess, nurse, under nurse, cook, laundry maid, and three housemaids. No doubt there was male help as well, which did not live under the same roof, but the house nevertheless must have been quite crowded, particularly in those parts which housed the children and the servants. One wonders how many were packed into the rooms which, because they could be reached by the old stone stair, were effectively insulated from the front of the house. According to a window in Austwick church, Mr. Watkins died at Lawkland in 1896. Christopher Ingleby was already dead, and his son, the Reverend Arthur, at some time Rector of Oban, never returned. For whatever reason he needed money, Arthur raised a mortgage on the estate in 1909 for £3,000, and in 1914 sold up. Whether Mrs. Watkins still lived at Lawkland until then is uncertain. When she left the large house, she moved no further than Austwick village, and died there in 1923, again according to the inscription on the church window. The Austwick house may also have been Ingleby property, since Arthur’s only daughter lived in the village until her death in 1965, and the house is still owned by relations. The purchaser in 1914 was a flamboyant character called John Norman Ambler, eldest son of John Ambler, cloth manufacturer, of the Jeremiah Ambler woollen mills in Bradford. They lived at Heaton Mount. He knew the area well; having been a boy at Giggleswick School 1904-8, and the purchase of Lawkland Hall was after his marriage to Madeleine McEvoy, whose brother married one of the Ambler daughters. The McEvoys lived nearby, at Stackhouse, and the rather sparse information about Norman Ambler is derived from the McEvoy children, who remember playing Red Indians among the thick and lowering yew trees of the garden. Norman was only 23 at the time of his marriage, 25 when he bought Lawkland, and was soon after sucked into the First World War, spending much of it in Salonika. While he was away, the family mills made important profits from the manufacture of khaki uniform cloth, and he came home to find himself a very well-off man, though not, it would appear, as rich as he thought he was. During the twenties, a great deal of money was spent on refurbishing Lawkland Hall. As well as his building operations, Ambler’s interests included becoming Master of the Vale of Lune Harriers, 7
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and holidaying with his wife in Italy and the south of France. The alterations included the importation and fixing of large amounts of contemporary panelling, the rebuilding of the main staircase, grand new fireplaces. The garden was decorated with stone lions from Italy, a sunken bath was installed (this, according to the family, a whim of Mrs. Ambler’s copied from Danieli’s Hotel in Venice), and the iron gates included a coat of Ambler arms, recently acquired from the College of Heralds and made up by the Austwick blacksmith: ‘Sable, on a fess or between three pheons each within an annulet argent, a lion passant guardant gules,’ and the motto ‘Amicus certus’. There were no children of the marriage, and a holiday in Antibes resulted in a divorce and a second marriage (at Reno) to the daughter of the American Consul at Nice. The first Mrs. Ambler, being of an Irish Catholic family, could not reconcile herself to this, and regarded her husband as no better than a bigamist. By 1937 the Amblers had left Lawkland and it was rented to James Southworth, who bought it in 1939, by which time Norman Ambler was established at Antibes with his second wife, and remained there for the rest of his life, dying, it is believed, some time in the late 1970’s. Southworth got a bargain. He paid £8500 for the house, gardens, two cottages and 82 acres mostly of woodland in the owner’s hand, and two good farms, Lawkland Green and Lawkland Hall Farm, each of which comprised about 225 acres. The estate in all was of 545 acres. It is hard to believe such a ridiculous price, even given the parlous state of local agriculture at the time. Twenty years later Southworth sold to Richard Bowring, whose family is still at Lawkland, and who are the best people to complete the latest paragraphs of this history. Emmeline Garnett
April 2001
Sources used Whittaker: Richmondshire (1823) Speight: The Craven and North West Yorkshire Highlands (1909) Pevsner: Yorkshire, West Riding (1959) Kelly: English Catholic Missions (1907) Probate Documents (Lancashire Record Office) Mullins (ed.) Giggleswick School Register (1913) Lawkland Hall Deeds Clapham Parish Registers Census Returns 1841-1891 Burke’s Landed Gentry (1898) Hutton: Report (1985) Family and local information
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