PMP2000 > Places > Charnwood History

ESTATES AND PARKS

BEAUMANOR:
DERIVATION: French BEAU MANOIR ("BEAUTIFUL MANOR")

Immediately after the NORMAN CONQUEST of 1066, the Manor which included BEAUMANOR was granted to the EARL OF CHESTER by WILLIAM I.

In 1232, the estate was granted to HUGH LE DESPENSER by Henry III and land was taken from the uncultivated wastes of the Manors of BARROW and LOUGHBOROUGH to form a DEER PARK.

The earliest written record of a house at BEAUMANOR dates from 1277, when a steward of the estate mentions repairs to an already existing building. This implies that there has been a house of some sort on the site for almost 750 years. In the earliest days, this probably took the form of a hunting lodge and would be in use only during the deer hunting season.

An account of the house in 1277-8 describes it as follows:

"Within a moated enclosure of considerable dimensions, surrounded by a thick hedge or stockade, stood a hall, a great chamber each of stone, with slate roofs, an inner chamber, and a Knight's chamber (where Sir Hugh Despenser the Son slept)".

There was a gatehouse and, next to it, a porter's lodge containing a guardroom. The moat was crossed by a bridge. The remaining buildings included a grange, stables, a slaughter house, pantry, friar's chamber and bakery.

DEER were very important at this time and parks proliferated all over the region. Parks were surrounded by secure boundaries, usually a ditch and a wooden fence called the 'Park Pale". But records indicate that BEAUMANOR had a wall, rather than a fence. Inside this secure area, the deer would be kept in a semi-wild state, to be hunted only by the Lord and his guests. Deer poaching was severely punished. At BEAUMANOR, Red and Fallow Deer were kept in separate enclosures. As the importance of deer receded, park land slowly converted to agricultural use. Deer would still graze here, but there would also be other livestock and some "ridge and furrow" arable cultivation as well. Timber was another very important crop, both as building materials and coppiced for charcoal.

The DESPENSERS owned the estate for three generations until the family fell from royal favour and their lands forfeited in 1327. BEAUMANOR then passed into the hands of the BEAUMONT family until the late fifteenth century. In 1524, the estate was granted to the GREY family. At the time of the death of LADY JANE GREY in 1554, BEAUMANOR was owned by her uncle, LORD LEONARD GREY. LEONARD, his brother, JANE, and her husband GUILDFORD DUDLEY were all executed for their parts in the plot to dethrone MARY I. JANE's mother, FRANCES, DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK was allowed to live at BEAUMANOR, where she quickly married again, to ADRIAN STOKES, her former equerry. On her death, STOKES continued to live at BEAUMANOR and eventually became an MP for Leicestershire.

In 1595, the estate was bought by WILLIAM HERRICK. He had made a fortune in London as a goldsmith and banker and immediately began repairing the house, which was described as "anciennte" . It is unknown whether any of the original medieval building was retained the new house as no plan of it has survived. It is known, however, that it had a moat with a drawbridge and inventories list many of the rooms and their contents. It is almost certain that the house was built around a central courtyard and that the estate would have been practically self-sufficient.

A reference of 1656 describes the site as follows:

"The Manor House is moated round about with a fair and clear moat; and a little distance from the said moat are barns and stables and all other useful offices standing and seated, about which said building is a second moat and round this ancient manor house lieth the said park".

It was in the 17th century that deer ceased to be kept in the park and the land was turned over completely to farming and woodland.

HERRICK was knighted in 1605 and lived to the (then) remarkable age of 96 before dying in 1653.

WILLIAM HERRICK III was already heavily in debt when he took over the estate in 1672. He immediately began selling large numbers of trees to make money but he still left his heir, WILLIAM HERRICK IV, in dire financial straits. He had to mortgage much of the estate, so much so that self-sufficiency became just a memory for BEAUMANOR.

Another catastrophe struck the house in 1696 when the house was flooded out after exceptionally heavy thunderstorms. WILLIAM HERRICK IV described the event:

"The water came so extraordinary fast from the Forest hills that the brooks could not contain the waters within them and it came... through the great gates into the courtyard and all over the Hall, Parlour, Pantry, Kitchen, Larders and Cellars that the hogsheads swam out of the cellar to the hall door and the people went into these rooms up to their knees..."

It may be that HERRICK felt building a new house would ultimately be cheaper than continually patching up the old one and, in 1726, work began on the next BEAUMANOR HALL. JOHN WESTLEY of Leicester was contracted to build the house, at a cost of £1,020. To save money, much of the old house was used as materials for the new and several old rooms (presumably those in better repair) remained. WESTLEY eventually withdrew from the project but for what reason is unknown. Consequently, we do not know whether the house was actually completed to the original design. There is a plan for this house, but as no inventories were made and family papers are sparse, little is known of what was in them.

Wealth returned to BEAUMANOR in the 1830s, after WILLIAM HERRICK inherited the estate from his uncle. This totalled 1,783 acres in Leicestershire, mostly in CHARNWOOD. Fairly soon, he received "a very considerable accession of wealth from his mother's side" and proceeded to demolish the earlier house and "built a house for himself in some sort commensurate with the ample means which the providence of God placed at his disposal". This wealth came from the will of his maternal grandfather, THOMAS PERRY, a condition of which was that WILLIAM should change his name to PERRY HERRICK.

Work on the house began in 1842, designed by the fashionable architect WILLIAM RAILTON, who had also built nearby GRACEDIEU for the De Lisles.

Due to additions and alterations, the original budget of £9,723 soon swelled to £12,000. HERRICK became very popular with local people by insisting on employing local craftsmen wherever possible and the most skilled were to receive 5s 6d per day!

By the time it was completed in 1848, the cost of the present BEAUMANOR HALL had spiralled to £37,000, a phenomenal amount of money at the time. (As a comparison, HERRICK was able to buy five cottages in WOODHOUSE EAVES in 1856 for £350!).

The square shaped, three storey house was built of red brick in a Victorian-Jacobean style. It has richly worked oak doors and it's chief feature inside is an intricately carved oak staircase. (Both of these were carved by my great-grandfather, JOHN MEE).

By the time of WILLIAM PERRY HERRICK's death in 1876, he had bought a further 4,000 acres of land, making him one of the most substantial landowners in the area. His widow, SOPHIA lived on at the estate until her death in 1915 when the estate passed to MONTAGUE CURZON, who took the name HERRICK by royal licence.

In 1939 BEAUMANOR was requisitioned by the WAR DEPARTMENT as a listening station, as radio reception surveys revealed German high frequency signals could be received very clearly here. Many outbuildings were put up and existing ones converted, all camouflaged. Some were painted to look like cricket pavilions and greenhouses.

BEAUMANOR played a crucial, highly secret role in the breaking of the German ENIGMA code during the Second World War. Thousands of coded German messages were intercepted here and logged by teams of radio operators before being passed on to the the code breakers at BLETCHLEY PARK near Milton Keynes. BEAUMANOR was known as "STATION Y", while BLETCHLEY was "STATION X". The vast majority of BEAUMANOR's "listeners" were women from the ATS (AUXILIARY TERRITORIAL SERVICE). Each listener was allocated their own waveband on a four watch system which ensured monitoring continued 24 hours a day. Because of the secret nature of their work, contact between the "listeners" and the local people was greatly restricted. Most of the "listeners" and other staff were billeted at nearby GARAT'S HAY, a mainly Victorian Building but with some surviving 13th century features.

Much of the work done here during the war is only now coming to light but some of it will soon be seen by millions in the film "ENIGMA". This is based on THOMAS HARRIS's best selling novel and charts the fight of the code crackers at Bletchley. Several sections are also set at BEAUMANOR and recently many local people were used as "extras" in filming which took place at the GREAT CENTRAL RAILWAY.

At the end of the war, the estate was broken up. BEAUMANOR HOUSE and GARAT'S HAY were sold to the War Department, remaining as a listening station until 1974. BEAUMANOR was then sold to LEICESTERSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL and is now an educational centre and conference centre for teachers. GARAT'S HAY officially remains a MINISTRY OF DEFENCE property but most of the buildings are now boarded up.

(It was only after the house was sold by the Ministry of Defence, and the lifting of Official Secrets Act regulations that my mother and I could see for the first time the staircase carvings done by her great-grandfather. TA)

FROM "THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF CHARNWOOD FOREST" (TR Potter,1842)

"On my second visit, three hundred children with happy faces were on their way to BEAUMANOR. On enquiring the object of this assemblage of healthy-looking rustics, I learnt that they were "going to BEAUMANOR for a valentine"; where, I understood, each child received a penny, and a halfpenny on their returning, from Miss Watkinson.... This custom has long since been observed here. In 1743 there were only thirty recipients".

"An Old Saying - Time was when those bare hills (of CHARNWOOD FOREST) as well as the valleys at their feet, were covered with majestic oaks - when, to use the words of an old tradition. "a squirrel might be hunted six miles without once touching the ground; and when a traveller might journey from BEAUMANOR to Bardon on a clear summer's day without seeing the sun"."

ERICK THE FORESTER:
The HERRICKS of BEAUMANOR traditionally traced their ancestry back to ERICK THE FORESTER and, beyond, to the ancient Kings of Sweden. ERIC is supposed to have gathered a large force at COPT OAK to resist the advance of the NORMANS into CHARNWOOD. He was defeated but WILLIAM I was reputedly so impressed by him that he made ERICK one of his Generals!

HANGING STONE:
"HANGINGSTONE HILLS" themselves are now part of a golf course but there are several other natural outcrops in the area.

In March 1791, the antiquarian THROSBY was the first to record the name "HANGING STONE" and he made a small sketch of the outcrop, with his horse under it for comparison. The horse had a lucky escape, though, as less than a month later the whole rock collapsed, leaving only a supporting base 6 feet square.

The later (and rather imaginative!) historian POTTER conjectured that this rock had been a druidic sacrificial altar and even wrote a short poem about it:

"The arch druid, who, it may be, standing there, Dyed it with human immolations, calling On the grey ghosts, the riders of the clouds - Or moon - or to the lightnings of the night - Or war-god, deaf as winds that whistled by them - Whilst Celtic savages howled beneath - is past!"

A fanciful offering which tells us rather more about the attitudes of early Victorians than any reality of pre-Roman life in the area!