GAINSBOROUGH

 I've had some good times in Gainsborough (mostly at the Peacock on Corringham Road!, now, sadly, demolished). Gainsborough is bisected by the River Trent, which has a tidal bore. OK, so not quite in the league of the Severn Bore, but not bad all the same. The bore is called the aegir - named after the Norse god of rushing water. 

The most distinctive building is the Old Hall, a superb Medieval manor house, which lies right at the heart of the town.

Thomas Burgh II (c.1430–1496) inherited the manor of Gainsborough in 1455 from his mother – his father had died shortly after his birth. Over the next two decades, he began rebuilding works on the estate. Archaeological investigations indicate there were earlier structures on the same site, but there is no evidence as to the date of those buildings.

Tree-ring dating conducted in the 1980s indicates building likely began in the later 1460s, perhaps reflecting Thomas’s knighthood in 1461 and his growing status at court. But it is also possible that it began in the early 1470s following an attack on his estates by men loyal to Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, where forces ‘pulled down his place, and took all his goods and chattels that they might find’.

When Thomas died in 1496, the estate was inherited by his eldest son, Edward (1464–1528). Despite careful preparations put in place by Thomas, Edward failed to forge the same degree of close personal relationship with Henry VII as his father had.
Edward soon found himself in debt to Henry and subject to suspicions of involvement in plots against the king. He was imprisoned in 1497, and in 1510 declared insane – ‘distracted of memorie’. After Edward’s death, his son Thomas III (c.1487–1550) inherited the hall at Gainsborough.

By 1540 Thomas seems to have moved the household to Euston in Suffolk, the seat of his second wife. Though Henry VIII stayed at the hall in 1541 with Catherine Howard, Gainsborough was no longer the centre of Burgh affairs.

Thomas III’s son William (1522–84) also lived away from Gainsborough and focused his attentions on his southern estates. Thomas IV (1558–97), William’s son, also seems to have given little attention to the estate, though the fine newel stair and gallery added to the southern face of the great hall may date to his ownership. Increasingly saddled by debt, and with complaints that his estate was in disarray, Thomas IV was forced to sell a number of holdings.

Gainsborough was sold to William Hickman (1549–1625), a London merchant, who moved in with his first wife, Agnes, and his mother, Rose, in 1596. Agnes died childless three years later, but William was quickly remarried to Elizabeth Willoughby, 32 years his junior and with whom he had four children.
William and Elizabeth invested in the hall, fashioning a more modern and serviceable family residence.

Ownership of the Hall continued with his son Willoughby (1604–49). During the Civil Wars (1642–51), Willoughby Hickman kept a low profile, managing to be made baronet by Charles I in 1643 while also retaining his estates under the emerging Commonwealth. Willoughby’s heirs, his son William (1628–82) and grandson Willoughby (1659–1720), established roles as Justices of the Peace, Commissioners and MPs, and were important regional players.

Sir Neville Hickman (1701–33), the great-great-grandson of the first William Hickman, inherited in 1720. By around 1730 he had moved the family out to nearby Thonock Hall, leaving the now Old Hall to an uncertain future. Across the next two centuries the hall ceased to act as a unified building, the various structures being adapted to different uses that would change over time.
The east range was leased in 1733 to Willoughby Bertie, the future 3rd Earl of Abingdon. A century later the principal rooms of the range were reported to be in use as the workshop of Samuel Spray, a machine maker.

Between 1759 and 1789, John Wesley preached in the main chamber and the yard outside. Then, in 1790 the Hall became a theatre for the town. It then underwent many other uses, including as a Masonic Lodge.

In 1924 the then owner, Hickman Beckett Bacon approached Sir Charles Peers at the Ministry of Works with an offer to place the Old Hall into the care of the state. That offer was declined, but Hickman’s nephew Sir Edmund Castell Bacon continued to work towards the long-term protection of the building. In 1949 he handed responsibility for the buildings to a new group, the Friends of the Old Hall Association (FOHA). Over the next two decades the FOHA, an entirely voluntary group, raised substantial funds to carry out extensive restoration work to the building, and opened the hall as a visitor attraction and community resource. In 1969 the Old Hall was transferred into the care of the state and is now managed by English Heritage.