Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Langley Hall, Meynell Langley
The history of Langley, just north west of Derby on the road to Ashbourne, is complex to say the least. As a consequence, it is not without its fair share of lost houses, about one of which we have sufficient information to be able to say something about it. The manor of Langley originally consisted of a knight’s fee and, by 1108 had been granted by the Norman grandee Ralph FitzHubert to one Robert de Meynell, whose father was the Domesday tenant of FitzHubert in the NE of the county. Until the senior male line of the de Meynell’s failed in 1227, and the family’s extensive holdings were divided amongst the husbands of his four daughters, the family continued to hold it entire. At that date however, some family holdings survived the division of land, and a half knight’s fee at Langley was bestowed upon the next brother of the grandfather of the four heiresses, who was called William. Another half knight’s fee at Langley – half the original manor – was bestowed upon William’s brother-in-law, Nicholas son of Ralph of Langley, otherwise Nicholas FitzRalph. The division was basically made using the line of the ancient Derby to Ashbourne road as a boundary. Nicholas FitzRalph had everything to the south, including Nether Burrows, Langley Common and Langley Green. He also founded the church of St. Michael on his half, for it does not appear in the Domesday Book and is mostly of that date and later. Hence his portion was distinguished by the name of Kirk Langley or Church Langley, the use of the Norse derived term ‘kirk’ suggesting a substantial Danish-speaking population in the area since the fall of eastern Mercia to the Vikings in 874. A new settlement grew up around this church. Meanwhile, William de Meynell retained everything to the north and east of the road, including the original village, which henceforth became Meynell Langley. It was situated just to the north and east of the present Langley Hall, and was investigated archaeologically in 1980. William de Meynell, seems to have adopted the place as his chief seat and built a house for his son mentions a ‘capital mansion’ there in a charter drawn up a few years later. Probably he founded a chapel to serve the village, too, and this appears to have become absorbed by the house, as happened at Markeaton Hall in the Medieval period. Once the village had become de-populated, it eventually became the hall’s domestic chapel. Further evidence for old Meynell Langley Hall dates from 1555 when it is recorded as having a deer park. William Senior’s map of 1640, shows a house, more or less on a similar site to the present hall, orientated NE-SW and set around most of a large courtyard. Now, the chances are that it had once been twice that size by the early 14th century, for the Meynells had become very important figures, two of them (both called Sir Hugo) serving as stewards to the Ferrers Earls of Derby, all holding important administrative posts and two fighting doughtily in Edward III’s campaigns in France. They even briefly inherited a barony from the de la Wardes of Newhall. They were certainly of equivalent standing to the FitzHerberts of Norbury, a fragment of whose ancient house survives. We know from research carried out in 2010 that originally Norbury Hall was set around two courtyards which was par for the course with important knightly families in our area then. Therefore, the inference must be that the hall at Meynell Langley was similarly laid out. Meanwhile, the FitzNicholas family at Kirk Langley were followed by the Twyfords, and the Twyfords by the Poles, and until the latter family inherited the place, no one amongst these families with their chief seats elsewhere, needed a house at Langley. The Poles however, did build a house, beside the church, the site of which is marked today by some uneven lumps in the field, called Pool Close, the mutated name deriving from that of the family. We have seen that in 1227, the senior line of the de Meynells ended with heiresses, leaving a younger branch with a diminished holding – mainly half of Langley and other places. The same thing happened in 1397. Ralph de Meynell died in 1389 leaving four daughters, who all married. His mother, Joan, held the estate until her death in 1397, when she divided it up, mostly between the daughters’ husbands, but part was bequeathed to her brother-in-law Sir William Meynell, whose posterity moved to Willington and Yeaveley. Meynell Langley went to Reginald Dethick of Dethick, whose only daughter married Ralph Bassett of Blore, in Staffordshire. It remained with their family until 1602, and the Bassetts it was who must have reined in the size of the house. They also rebuilt the chapel in Henry VIII’s reign, the date being confirmed by a pair of Nuremberg jettons found beneath the floor when it was demolished in 1757. From the Bassetts (who had as well bought Kirk Langley from the last of the Poles in the 1590s, re-uniting the manorial estate) it all passed to Charles I’s most loyal supporter, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, who allowed various relations to live in the hall, and who commissioned the 1640 map. By this time the village had vanished entirely – probably through a combination of the catastrophic climate change event of the 1340s, the consequent Black Death and the creation of the park, though by the 1640s the park too was mainly divided up for agricultural purposes. In the end, the Duke was financially ruined by the Civil War, and was keen to sell. The buyer was Isaac Meynell, one of three brothers who made colossal fortunes in the City during and after the Civil War; all three were descendants of Sir William Meynell of Willington, and were clearly keen to see the family return to their ancestral acres, despite the passage of 272 years! It eventually came
Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Stuffynwood Hall
One of my oldest friends is a great enthusiast for huge spiky Gothic Victorian country houses. He thinks Samuel Sander Teulon (‘the good ship Teulon’ as he always calls him) a genius who far outshines Wren or Adam and considers Damien Hurst deserving almost of deification for buying and restoring vast, inchoate and sprawling Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, designed by Charles Hanbury-Tracy, 1st Lord Sudeley, for himself and built between 1819 and 1840. Derbyshire is (in my view) blessedly free of houses like Toddington, or Somerleyton, or Mentmore. Most of our Jacobean is real Jacobean and Victorian prodigy houses have nearly all been demolished. Readers will recall an account of Snelston Hall last year – architecturally the best of them – of Osmaston Manor the year before, and you can still visit Eckington Hall (albeit seized by Sheffield City Council in 1936) in the NE of the County, which is a classic Hollywood ‘haunted house’ of a building. Locko Park although large, is largely Victorian, but harmoniously designed, spread around a fine early 18th century central block, tactfully incorporated. One particularly lumpish example of eclectic Victorian on a fairly epic scale was Stuffynwood Hall which stood just south of Shirebrook and a short distance NW of Mansfield Woodhouse. Built in 1857-58, it is in French Chateau style – French chateau on speed – with a huge, chunky tower behind and a lower wing to one side, like the main house, steep-roofed and prickling with skinny chimney stacks and pop-up dormers. The entire composition was wonderfully asymmetrical, largely over two lofty floors (plus attics), faced throughout in muscular rock-face ashlar of Permian Magnesian Limestone, and with a main block of three bays to the left and another three, wrapped round a vast canted bay with its own hipped roof, to the right. To the right was another two bays, the end one breaking forward with a loggia-like run of six ground floor windows to the right of the entrance, all much lower than the main block, with a service wing beyond again ending in a little pyramidally hipped roofed pavilion with a largish outshut behind beyond which was a large stable block arranged round a courtyard and a further service court to its east. This extraordinarily top-heavy looking house stood in a modest stretch of parkland running to 51 acres, and the entire estate, despite the proximity of numerous coal mines, was well sequestered. The name of the architect has completely evaded my research, but one might expect the culprit to have been a Nottingham man, or even a Chesterfield one. The estate itself was carved out of the manor of Shirebrook, held by a branch of the Meynell family who took the place as their surname, but sub-let most of it to Alan de Stuffyn around 1270, who was the park-keeper of the hunting park of Pleasley, where the Bec family then had a lodge, long vanished. Their park was stocked and emparkation granted by Edward I in 1288. The family were Bishops successively of St. Davids, Durham and (titular) Jerusalem. This Alan is almost certainly to be identified with Alan son of Hugh de Glapwell and grandson of Simon de Pleasley, facts which we can be fairly sure of thanks to the survival of the charters of the Woolhouse family, later of Glapwell Hall. By the middle of the fourteenth century Robert Stuffyn, probably great grandson, was of Shirebrook, and before long his name had become attached to the landscape, when a portion of his estate was called Stuffynwood. John son of Hugh Stuffyn (1615-1695) was the first of the family to be styled ‘gent’ instead of ‘yeoman’. His eldest son, John died aged 55 a year after him without leaving issue and his widow married Gilbert Mundy of Allestree Old Hall. His brothers having predeceased him unmarried, the estate passed to John Hacker of Trowell and by various inheritances and sales to Robert Malkin of Chesterfield. Having never seen an inventory for any of the Stuffyn family, I cannot really assess what sort of or size of house they lived in, but suffice it to say that when Charles Paget, a member of an old Ibstock family lately grown affluent through business, mainly in Nottinghamshire, bought the 300 acre estate from Malkin, there was a modest Georgian house on the site of the hall. The Pagets had intermarried with the Hollins family, who had acquired the Pleasley Mills from that supreme entrepreneur, Henry Thornhill (1708-1790), and thus Charles was keen that his son Joseph should live nearby with a view to taking a hands-on role at the mills. The upshot was the building of Stuffynwood Hall, which was to enjoy a short and really rather unhappy existence. Photographs of the interior have proved elusive, although some may exist in the family papers lodged at the LSE. Fortunately my copy of Leonard Jacks’s account of the country houses of Nottinghamshire (1881) strays over the border here so that he can continue to flatter the Pagets, who also owned Ruddington Grange. He tells us that the house was greatly extended by Joseph Paget from 1873-1880, adding the rear wing, the hulking great tower (complete with skied water tank to improve the domestic economy) and a domestic (Catholic) chapel. Joseph married Helen, daughter of Revd. Edward Abney of The Firs, Derby. He was a great friend of W H Fox-Talbot, the photographic pioneer who was married to a Mundy of Markeaton. They are known to have made Talbotypes of several Derbyshire houses in the late 1840s early 1850s. Abney also encouraged Derby’s pioneering Victorian topographical photographer Richard Keene (1825-1894). Would that we still had any photograph Joseph’s father-in-law might have made of Stuffynwood! Jacks notes that the house boasted ‘large and well-lit rooms, had a separate billiard room with an adjustable frosted glass roof (to let out the fragrant vapours of the contestants’ Havanas no doubt) and that the house was very early fitted with self-generated electricity, hence
