The Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Foston Hall

Most readers, on seeing the title of this piece, might instantly be tempted to pen a letter to the editor complaining that Foston Hall is not lost at all, but a prison for convicted women criminals, easily seen from the modern A50. Well, that is true, but we know of two previous houses on the site, both significant and worth recording. The first, of which no known picture exists, was built in the Tudor or early Stuart period, but was replaced in 1809 by a very stylish Regency house, of which some vestiges remain embedded in the present structure.
We do not know who the sub-tenant of Henry de Ferrers was at Foston at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, but it came to Henry de Derby in around 1100 (he may have married the heiress of the first sub-tenant) and was in the hands of his son Robert when the latter died without issue in 1130 and left the manorial estate to his younger brother John. It is unclear exactly who these de Derbys were; a family of that name (and of Norse descent) were virtual rulers of Derby from shortly after the Conquest until they were finally decimated during the Black Death, but Henry does not show up on their pedigree as reconstructed from surviving charters.
By 1286 one Walter de Agard held Foston and we are told by one ancient document that he was fifth in descent from the first of his family to settle at Foston (presumably by marrying the heiress of the de Derbys) and that this man, Richard de Agard, was from Lancashire. Allowing 25 years per generation this would suggest that Richard Agard married a daughter or sister of John de Derby, which at least fits: only positive documentation is missing.

All this suggests that there must have been a capital mansion at Foston from an early date, but where it stood is unclear. The park was landscaped in the late 18th century (perhaps by William Emes, a lake enthusiast) and the complex of lakes to the south of the present house, fed by the Foston Brook, may have been adapted from a moat. (I must confess to being unable to say whether these survive, for on my visit to Foston over thirty years ago, I was told by my personable hostess, Miss Scriven the then governor, that a survey of the grounds was understandably not possible for security reasons, and of course, I forgot to ask about any surviving features..
The Agards take their name from the Danish Ǻgǻrd, a habitation name (which does not appear to have survived to be entered into modern gazetteers) comprising the Norse elements à (= river) and gard (= enclosure), which hardly hands us any clues as to where in Lancashire they may have come from! They continued as proprietors of Foston, Scropton, Sapperton and Osleston into the Tudor period, when Clement Agard’s second son Arthur (1540-1615), was appointed Escheator and Coroner to the Honour of Tutbury and of the Bailiwick of Leek (Staffs.), a post he held for an astonishing 45 years. He was succeeded by his nephew, Sir Henry whose right to hold these profitable offices was challenged by the Crown, but he maintained he held it by tenure of
‘A white hunter’s horn, garnished with silver, inlaid with gold, in the middle and at both ends. To which is fixed a girdle of black silk, adorned with certain buckles of silver embellished with the arms of England’ which he claimed Arthur had received on appointment by and from his predecessor, and that the item had descended from Walter de Agard in the late 13th century. The coat of arms on the horn (which still exists) is in fact that of John of Gaunt, as Duke of Lancaster (but used to represent the honour of Tutbury, the seat of the Duchy’s control in our area) impaling the arms of Ferrers, once Earls of Derby, which confirms its status as a hereditable badge of office so the article must date from after about 1375.
The horn continued in the family until the death of Sir Henry in 1635, when it passed to as distant cousin, Sir Charles Agard, previously of Mackworth, Croxall and Osleston. He was assessed for tax on 12 hearths at Foston, suggesting a medium sized Tudor or slightly later manor house, the first hint we get of anything about the place.
Unfortunately Sir Charles found himself, at the Restoration, facing financial disaster as a result of having supported the King in the Civil War, a predicament that even holding the High Shrievalty of the County in 1660 had failed to ameliorate. His son John, having died before him, he sold Foston in 1675 and died five years later, when his remaining property passed through marriage of his daughter to the Stanhopes of Elvaston, including the horn and what by then was its remaining perk, the right to appoint the coroner for the area. Later, one of the Earls of Harrington sold it with its privileges to Samuel Foxlowe and from him it descended to the Bagshawes of Ford.
The Foston estate, was sold to Col. William Bate, who owned an estate in Barbados too and was a colonel of militia there. His father had come into the property through shrew conduct, having arrived in the Caribbean as a surgeon. William’s son Richard married Mary, daughter of John Newton of King’s Bromley and it was her brother Samuel who was living in the hall when Woolley wrote of him in 1712 as
‘…having a very good commodious seat there and to complete its pleasantness there is a pretty brook runs through his garden.’
The brook being the same that probably formed a medieval moat round the first house and was later to be dammed to created the double lake which was the centrepiece of the modest parkland from the end of the 18th century.

Richard’s son married Arabella, one of the two daughters and heiresses of Derby’s (then) richest man, Thomas Chambers of Exeter House, Derby, an opulent copper entrepreneur. There were two daughters, one became Countess of Exeter and the other became the mother of Sir Joseph Banks, Bt., FRS, FLS of Overton Hall, Ashover. Their brother, Revd Chambers Bate seems to have made improvements to the house, including the provision of fine wrought iron gates, but he died in 1764, leaving an unmarried son, Brownlow, who sold the estate in 1784 and died in 1815.
The new owner of the estate was John Broadhurst, whose father, also John, lived at The Gables, Duffield, and had begun life (it was said) as footman to the 1st Earl of Portmore, but made a vast fortune, amplified by the son. He seems to have had the parkland re-landscaped and served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire in 1791. He died in 1796 leaving two sons of whom the elder was insane and died in an asylum and the younger, John Broadhurst MP JP DL, inherited. He obtained a grant of arms in 1809 and decided to replace the house at this time, on a new site, that now occupied by the present one.
The new house was in high Regency style, albeit largely unornamented, and was of two storeys, built of stuccoed brick with stone dressings from over the Dove in Staffordshire, and boasted a south facade of seven bays, with a projecting central bay containing a tripartite window above a projecting portico of six columns. The east front was five bays wide, again with a wider central bay, all under a hipped tiled roof.
The architect is not known, but the house most closely resembles Park Hall, Hayfield, but the architect of that elegant seat is also not known. Broadhurst’s local connections might suggest a local man, but it looks from the surviving pencil drawing (done by cousin by marriage Charles Sneyd Edgeworth in 1816) just too sophisticated for Derby’s Richard Leaper, whose Burnaston House certainly ran it close as an exercise in the ‘stripped down’ Classicism of Sir John Soane.
However, this idyll did not remain so for long. In the 1830s, with the family living in London so that Broadhurst could attend the Commons, the house was let to Col. Charles Thorold Wood, and it was when he and his family were in residence that the house caught fire and burned down in 1836. Being settled elsewhere, Broadhurst did not trouble to replace it: perhaps he preferred to spend the insurance pay-out! He died in 1856 leaving a son, John, who was of a different mind and, in 1863, he called in Nottingham architect Thomas Chambers Hine to replace the house with the one we see today. On his death, the estate passed to the family of his brother-in-law, the Admiral Cumming.
Of the Regency house all that survives is part of the stable block (replaced by a much larger hunting stables by later owner Maj. G H Hardy in the Edwardian Period), but still there, entered through a remaining rusticated and pedimented archway, and a couple of grand chimneypieces.
Eventually the Home Office bought the 1863 house and some land after a spell housing the evacuated children of Derby’s St. Christopher’s Railway Orphanage during the Second World War, and it became a women’s prison.