The Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Hoon Hall
By Maxwell Craven
Hoon is a strange little place, a civil parish created from the larger ecclesiastical parish of Marston-on-Dove by some zealous bureaucrat in the early 20th century, which stretches from the low hills on the north side of the Dove down to the river itself, yet is barely a mile and a half wide, east to west. It was called ‘Hougen’ in 1086, when there were two manorial estates there, one of which was given to the Abbey of Burton and the other, which was granted to the Norse-descended grandee Saswalo or Sewallis, ancestor of the Shirley family.
The name itself derives from the old Englishword (in the ablative) for ‘by the barrows’, and indeed a large barrow – presumably Bronze Age – survives to this day. The name later mutated to ‘Howen’ and ‘Hone’ before the OS settled on the present spelling in the earlier 19th century, suggesting that the name was traditionally pronounced with an ’oh’ sound instead of an ‘oo’ one as its current spelling would suggest.
The Shirley family held the estate until 1559 when George Shirley of Staunton Harold sold Hoon to Roger Palmer of Kegworth, whose grandson, Robert, lived at Church Broughton, when he is said to have built the first hall in 1624. We know little about the house, but it must have been very modest, for it is unlocatable in the 1670 hearth tax returns, although by that date, it had been sold to John Stafford of Blatherwick in Northamptonshire who in turn had sold it on during the Civil War.
The purchaser in those lean and uncertain times was Robert Pye (1585-1662), who, it must be confessed, shared a common ancestry with your author, from the Pyes of The Mynde and Kilpeck in Herefordshire. Indeed, I had a kinsman who even bore the Pye name as his given name: I used to joke that it was a mercy the names were not deployed the other way round, strongly suggesting some dubious comestible.
Pye was a Royalist and had been nominated as a baronet on the outbreak of civil strife by Charles I but, with the upheavals, the honour failed to pass the Great Seal, and it was his son John (1626-1697) who, after the Restoration, did actually receive a baronetcy. Normally, in those circumstances (as with the Boothbys of Broadlow Ash) the baronetcy would have been confirmed to the father (alive or dead) but, as the elder son had been a keen Parliamentary commander, this idea failed to find favour with Charles II, so John received a fresh baronetcy – of Hoon, where he then lived.
The house of 1624 was probably timber framed, for in 1816 the Lysons described it as ‘an ancient half timbered building’. However, the latter add that it had ‘pointed gables’ and our only picture, a woodcut of 1892, shows just that, three of them, but with any timber framing stuccoed over. It also shows a pretty modest house – a farmhouse – with early 19th century cambered headed casement windows in place of the mullion and transom cross windows that must originally have graced the façade. Furthermore, the fenestration is clustered centrally, suggesting that, when the house was adapted as a tenanted farm, it underwent a drastic reduction and a re-façading, possibly even in brick, where previously there had been timber framing. There were almost certainly cross-wings at each end of the façade, the loss of which might have necessitated the change to the fenestration and its disposition that we see in the drawing.
The somewhat complex subsequent history of the house does throw some light on the matter, however. Sir Robert soon after moved to Faringdon, where he had acquired a larger property, to which he repaired, leaving his son, Charles, to go and live at Hoon after he came of age in 1672, although he was later described as ‘of Derby’ in 1713. He died in 1721, and his son only three years later, leaving it to his grandson, the dilletante Sir Robert, 4th Bt., but who lived at Clifton Campville, Staffordshire, leaving Hoon Hall empty after 1724, when he succeeded.
Sir Robert died in 1734 aged only 38 leaving no male heir , whereupon the baronetcy became extinct. His heiress had married Thomas Severne, whose son died in 1787 leaving the estate to Charles Watkins of Aynho, Northamptonshire. Watkins, like the Pyes, had little need of Hoon Hall and he is the one who reduced it, sometime prior to 1812, when he died, leaving the – now tenanted – farm and estate to a kinsman.
That kinsman, however, brings us almost full circle, for ironically he was Henry John Pye of Clifton Campville, who had just succeeded his father there. The father, Henry James Pye MP (1745-1813) was a descendant of then first Sir Robert Pye’s Cromwellian brother, Robert, who was excluded from the grant of the by then extinct baronetcy, but who had succeeded to all the other Pye properties except Hoon, in 1734.
H. J. Pye the elder is also of interest because from 1790 until his death in 1813, he had been poet laureate, a position he had been given not for being in the slightest bit talented as a poet, but in exchange for political favours toward William Pitt the younger, the prime minister.
Pye was the first poet laureate to receive a fixed salary of £270 instead of the historic tierce of Canary wine – Madeira to you and me, these days a rather unfashionable drink.
Nevertheless, young Henry Pye’s ownership of the estate was relatively brief for, being so far from his other properties, it was difficult in those days to administer and the house, of course, was by this time a working farmhouse. He therefore sold it to the Derby attorney William Jeffrey Lockett the younger (see Lockett’s House, Derby, Country Images, May 2022). Lockett died unmarried in 1848 aged 51, whereupon the house and farm were sold to Thomas Orme from whom it came to Thomas Buxton Mellor, who sold up the 800 acres estate in 1906 to yet another affluent lawyer, Edmund Maynard of Chesterfield.
Readers who love cricket, particularly Derbyshire cricket, will not be strangers to Maynard’s name. Born in 1861, he was educated at Harrow and played for Derbyshire from 1880 to 1887, captaining the side from 1885 to 1886 and into 1887. By 1906 he was keen to live nearer to Derby – to see the cricket, no doubt – and wanted, once he had completed his purchase, to live in a fine house. Consequently, he demolished a long low ancient farmhouse called Hoon Mount, and also Hoon Hall. The former he replaced with an unexceptional (but functional) Edwardian farm house, which was tenanted by the Naylors and then by J A Woolley in the 1970s. It survives at the heart of a working farm to this day.
For his own house, he built a new Hoon Mount (much later re-named Hoon Ridge). This was really rather a fine house, in Lutyensesque Arts-and-Crafts style with tall chimneys, sprocketed roofs and dormers, designed by George Morley Eaton of Derby, later President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and built in 1907. Maynard lived there until he died in 1931, when his heir sold to Maj. Arthur Betterson and after his time, in the 1960s, the estate was sold in parcels and the house became a residential home until its sale in spring 2016, at an asking price of £1,750,000.
