Old Hardwick Hall

Abstract

The ruined shell of Old Hardwick Hall stands just to the south of the house which first supplemented and eventually replaced it, Hardwick Hall, built by Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (known as Bess of Hardwick), from 1590. The history of the Old Hall was published in 1913. Although the building accounts were known at that time, and an inventory of 1601 was available, recent research has included dendrochronology and remote-sensing ground survey; and the study of inventories has refined historians’ understanding of how rooms were used.

This article profits from modern research to propose a new chronology of the surviving fabric of Old Hardwick Hall. Its west end incorporates the house in which Bess had been born in 1527, which may have been in existence since c.1375. Bess’s brother had owned it since 1547, and had altered it in the 1560s and 1570s. When she bought it from him in 1583 it had a great hall, which this article suggests was at right angles to the present one, and a detached kitchen. More buildings stood east of it at a slight angle. Bess began building in 1587, linking the medieval house and one of the angled buildings east of it. This article shows that she built a gallery, plastered in 1588, at third-floor level on top of the latter, and a richly decorated room called the Forest Great Chamber adjacent to it in 1589. Between 1591 and 1597 she rearranged the medieval house, now the west end of Old Hardwick Hall. She built a buttery and pantry west of the great hall, another gallery (the Little Gallery), and a second richly ornamented room, called the Hill Great Chamber, on the third floor, reached by stairs which were built in 1596. After her death the east end was rebuilt (in 1620), and two lodges were added north of the house (after 1628).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Dr Anke Timmermann and Dr Alison Wiggin of the English Language (School of Critical Studies), University of Glasgow, for permitting me to use their as yet unpublished Calendar of Letters to and from Bess of Hardwick on which they organized a rewarding exhibition at New Hardwick Hall, Unsealed The Letters of Bess of Hardwick, in 2011. I am also grateful to Richard Hewlings, who encouraged me to write this article; to the English Heritage staff at Old Hardwick Hall; and to the HMR photographic department for their valuable support.

Notes

1 Chatsworth House, Archives, Hardwick Box, 12 November 1910.

2 Basil Stallybrass, ‘Bess of Hardwick’s buildings and building accounts’, Archaeologia, 2nd ser., LXIV, 1912–13, 347–98.

3 David N Durant and Philip Riden (eds), ‘The building of Hardwick Hall’, Part 1, Derbyshire Record Society, IV, 1980; ibid., Part 2, IX, 1984.

4 Lindsay Boynton (ed.), ‘The Hardwick Hall inventories of 1601’, Furniture History Society, VII, 1971, 1–14.

5 Ibid., 2.

6 David N Durant, Bess of Hardwick, London, 1999, 77.

7 Chatsworth House, Archives, Drawer 278, Item 1.

8 Durant, Bess of Hardwick, cit., 119.

9 Ibid., 145–47.

10 Ibid., 104.

11 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 53–54.

12 Durant, Bess of Hardwick, cit., 147.

13 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 80.

14 Ibid., 94 and 120.

15 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 2, 212 and 213.

16 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 18.

17 David N Durant, The Smythson Circle, London, 2011, 113.

18 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 146.

19 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1581–1590, London, 1865, 453.

20 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 146; Arundel, Arundel Castle, Autograph Letters 1585–1617, No. 124.

21 Durant, Bess of Hardwick, cit., 165–67.

22 Ibid., 192–93.

23 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 18.

24 RE Howard, RR Laxton and CD Litton, ‘Tree-Ring Analysis of Timbers from Hardwick Old Hall, Doe Lea, Near Chesterfield, Derbyshire’, English Heritage, Centre for Archaeology Report 56/ 2002.

25 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 45.

26 Howard, Laxton and Litton, loc. cit.

27 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 2, 187–89.

28 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 57–61, payments to Hollingworth and his team of wallers for this work.

29 Ibid., 141 and 144.

30 Ibid., 87–119, ‘Payments to masons, January 1588–January 1591’, and 120–36, ‘Payments to masons, April 1591–December 1592’. The latter is mainly concerned with building in the stable yard to the south-east of the Old Hall.

31 Chatsworth Archives, MS 29, pp. 650 and 672.

32 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 57 and 58.

33 Ibid., 94, 95, 97, 99 and 100.

34 Ibid., 94.

35 Ibid., 10 and 11.

36 MW Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage, London, 1961, 224.

37 Durant and Riden, op. cit., Part 1, 149–50.

38 Ibid., 43, 7 December 1588, Thomas Fogge, plasterer, paid for ‘studding the romes over the hall’.

39 University of Nottingham, Trent and Peak Archaeological Unit, ‘Remote-sensing survey at Hardwick Old Hall, Derbyshire’, 1999. Trent and Peak has subsequently been taken over by the York Archaeological Unit.

40 Howard, Laxton and Litton, loc. cit.; RE Howard, RR Laxton and CD Litton, ‘Tree-Ring Analysis of Timbers from the Roof of the East Lodge, Old Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire’, English Heritage, Centre for Archaeology Report, 18/2000; RE Howard, RR Laxton and CD Litton, ‘Tree-Ring Analysis of Timbers from the Staircase of the West Lodge, Old Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire’, English Heritage, Centre for Archaeology Report, 57/2002.

41 There are many entries for carriage of timber in the building accounts, too numerous to list.

42 Kristian Kaminski, ‘Hardwick Old Hall: A History of Preservation 1608–1998’, unpublished report, English Heritage, 9.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Durant

In 1949 David Durant was Chief Navigating Officer of the MV Samantha (Lamport and Holt Line); he blacked both the eyes of his captain while in American waters, and was exonerated after an official enquiry by the British consul in New York. From 1952 to 1977 he was Chairman and Managing Director of Olympic Blazers, a children’s clothing factory in Nottingham. He published the building accounts of Hardwick Hall with Philip Riden in 1980; and he has written biographies of Bess of Hardwick, Arbella Stuart and the Smythson family of architects, besides an account of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonial attempts, and five other books on architecture.