Baddesley Clinton Hall

Baddesley Clinton Hall



Baddesley Clinton first caught my eye at Marylebone Tube where the picture of the moated manor house provides an alluring double width poster on the Tube wall. So on one of the few fine Sundays in August we head up the M40 to Shakespeare’s County (and my father’s! http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/11/moonlight-sonata_14.html ) of Warwickshire to see this historic house which has stood here since the 13th Century.





Ferrers family portraits



Baddesley Clinton is a medieval moated manor house just to the south east of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The Baddesley part of the name comes from a Saxon called Baeddi who cleared the site in the Forest of Arden. The Clinton part comes from the Clinton family who dug the moat in the 13th century. This atmospheric house we see today dates from the 15th century and was the home of the Ferrers family for 500 years. The house and interiors reflect its heyday in the Elizabethan era, when it was a haven for persecuted Catholics – there are three priest's holes. There is a delightful garden with stewponds (ponds which provided fish for the house) and a romantic lake and nature walk.











Baddesley Clinton Hall was originally a 13th century fortified manor house, founded by Thomas de Clinton. The rectangular platform encased by a wide revetted moat, now supports the remains of a 15th century stone quadrangular strong house, founded by the Brome family. The east range is flanked by a two storey gatehouse, with four gunloops but the original hall in the north range has disappeared. To the north and north east are the linear depressions and undulations of The Forecourt, medieval building ranges, which were dismantled during the early 18th century.







This moated manor house just north of the historic town of Warwick in the English county of Warwickshire was probably established sometime in the 13th century. When large areas of the Forest of Arden were cleared and eventually converted to farmland, this large fortified manor house was probably also built. In 1438, John Brome, the Under Treasurer of England, bought the manor. It then passed to his son, Nicholas, who is thought to have built the East Range, which is the main entrance. Nicholas is also responsible for the extensive rebuilding of the nearby church of St Michael's, done as penance for killing the parish priest, a murder reputed to have taken place in the great house itself.











The Hall was built as a semi-fortified manor-house surrounded by a moat, and approached by a drawbridge. It now consists of three sides (or ranges) of an approximate rectangle, having lost its west range. The internal courtyard was originally about 57 ft. north to south and 37 ft. east to west, and were not a true rectangle, the west and north sides being a little longer than those opposite them; the ranges are roughly 25 ft. deep. The moat averages about 30 ft. in width on three sides and about half that width on the east. The entrance front with a gatehouse is towards the north. All the ranges are of two stories.











As you drive up the private road to the house from Rising Lane, you start to wonder if it's worth visiting. All you can see is fields and trees. The house is not in sight until you get to the car park. From a distance it looks fairly modest. But once you get closer, the significance of the place begins to penetrate.4





Bedroom



It was the home of the Ferrers, a staunch Catholic family, for 500 years. The gem of a country manor house, part of which dates back to medieval times, is surrounded by a moat, which is the oldest feature of Baddesley. It originally had a drawbridge but this had been replaced by a gatehouse built by Sir Edward Ferrers by the 1520s. As you walk around the moat, it becomes visually clear that each side of the house was built in different eras in the 17th and 18th centuries, despite the Ferrers family's long-lasting financial difficulties.









Great Hall



Baddesley Clinton has seen little change since 1633 when Henry Ferrers 'the Antiquary' died. Henry Ferrers was Squire at Baddesley for almost seventy years and remodelled the house over a long period of time, introducing much of the panelling and chimney pieces. Henry was proud of his ancestry and began the tradition at Baddesley of armorial glass, which has continued to the present day.









Armorial glass



The house experienced one of its most dramatic events during the Tudor period. During this time it was an offence to attend Catholic mass, people were fined for not attending Church of England services and Priests could suffer savage punishment. In an attempt to maintain the faith, priests were trained abroad, smuggled into the country and then hidden by a covert network of sympathisers. In Warwickshire, as elsewhere in England, many of the gentry continued to practice what they saw as the true faith. One such family were the Ferrers who owned Baddesley Clinton.





Priesthole



In 1591, the house was the scene for a secret conference of Catholic Priests. Amongst those at the conference were the well known Jesuit Priests John Gerard, and Henry Garnet as well as seven or eight fellow Jesuits, other Priests and a few fugitive sympathisers. All of these people were being actively sought by the authorities and the capture of such a group would have dealt a serious blow to the secret Catholic mission to England.





Chapel



Four armed Priest hunters (known as Pursuivants) had arrived and were loudly threatening a servant who had barred the door to them. Because the servant had delayed their entry the Priests inside the house had time to hide their vestments and the altar stuff. The Priests even had time to turn the mattresses on their beds so that they would not feel warm to a searchers touch.





Library



By the time the mistress of the house had come downstairs and allowed the searchers to enter, the Priests were hidden in a secret hide underneath the house. They had to remain crouched here for four hours whilst the search went on above them. Eventually the searchers tired of their efforts and left after they had extracted payment from the household for their troubles. John Gerard wrote the account of this search in his memoirs when he escaped England and returned to live the rest of life on the continent. Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet were not so lucky as both of them were later caught and executed by being hung, drawn and quartered.











Restoring the stonework in Arden Shale, a local sandstone



Baddesley Clinton also has a strong link to Cardinal John Henry Newman. He was a friend of the family and received Lady Chatterton, Edward Dering and Rebecca Ferrers into the Catholic Church in 1865. After this, he occasionally visited Baddesley and there is a portrait of him by Rebecca in the lower landing. At least two saints (Robert Southwell and Nicholas Owen) walked the corridors of this house. This number may well rise to three in years to come.







The decoration and furnishing of the house also bears the stamp of Marmion Edward Ferrers, and his wife Rebecca who continued to embellish the house with stained glass and heraldry. Pictures painted by Rebecca remain to show how the romantic character of Baddesley was enjoyed in the late nineteenth century when the family also re-created a sumptuously furnished Chapel.











Baddesley Clinton has a particularly beautiful garden which includes ponds, a walled garden, lakeside walk and nature trail. The gardens at Baddesley Clinton are delightful. They surround the moated manor and include formal courtyard garden, wildflower and meadow garden, woodland/lakeside walks, and stew ponds. Edward Ferrers was responsible for creating the ‘court garden’ by 1722 as part of his improvements to the house. It is an enclosed and formal area of grass, in the centre of which a sundial has recently been reinstated with surrounding borders of shrub roses. It also contains a very attractive reconstruction of a thatched decorative shelter in the cottage ornée tradition where ladies could shelter from either the rain or sun on the perambulations.













It is well worth a perambulation to this day to view the superb dahlia border and the herb borders. There is a Japanese style bridge over the Long Ditch linking the stewponds and nature trail areas by the lake and walks through the old estate are both clearly signposted and rewarding.





One too many!

Stewponds and lake



Like most National Trust this is a well run property with the former farm and stable yards providing the visitor facilities which include an entrance and information building, an outdoor snack bar, a Barn Restaurant, a book sale and sales of plants from the gardens along with garden furniture.





















Court Garden



The barn housing the restaurant was built in 1721-2 incorporating trusses from the earlier buildings on the site. It was used for storing and threshing grain. The restaurant has turned back the clock to discover the tastes of those times past. Selections of home-cooked foods are now on offer including sandwiches, salads, hot main dishes and puddings. Morning coffee is served from 11.00am, lunches from 12noon until 2.30pm and afternoon tea until 5.00pm.



The house itself is hugely atmospheric. The heirs of the Ferrers family spent 10 years attempting to transfer Baddesley Clinton to the National Trust and over the years much of the original furniture was sold to keep the wolf from the door. However some of the original fixtures have been reinstated and the Manor has been furnished and laid out in a style appropriate to its age. There are helpful and fascinating displays throughout as you go around adding depth and background to the experience. A particular mention must be made of the extremely helpful volunteer staff who are very happy to volunteer information and share their obvious enthusiasm for this unique slice of England’s history.



So visit and enjoy a day out at one of the most enchanting properties owned by the National Trust.





Getting to Baddesley Clinton



Baddesley Clinton



Rising Lane, Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire B93 0DQ

Telephone: 01564 783294



Opening Times.



House:



10th February to 31st October:



Wednesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays 11.00am - 5.00pm.







Grounds/shop/restaurant:



10th February to 19th December 2010:



Wednesday to Sunday (3 Nov - 19 Dec 11.00 am - 4.00 pm)

House also open 1 Dec - 19 Dec 2010 11.00 am - 4.00 pm



Seven day opening during school holidays - please check with the property for details.



Website; http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-baddesleyclinton







For other nearby National Trust properties see;



Upton House



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/09/upton-house-oxfordshire.html



Farnborough Hall



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/search/label/Farnborough%20Hall

Waddesdon in Summer

Waddesdon Manor



Waddesdon Manor, 6 miles outside Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, always creates a sense of expectation. From the first glimpse of towers and turrets seen above the trees from the A41 to the long drive in which curves around the hill the excitement builds up as you approach the final spectacle, a French Renaissance Château on a hill in Buckinghamshire. For this was the way it was designed, the Victorian version of a blingtastic crib; not an ancient building added to over the generations but a modern building masquerading as a French Château with all mod cons and dressed to impress stuffed full of a most fantastic collection of Le Style Rothschild. This is a style best described as Tout les Louis and then some.





Dairy





Wine Cellars



Even today beautifully restored by the Rothschild family the richness of the interiors both impresses and oppresses and the Manor is surrounded by impeccable gardens planted with wondrous planting as they would have been in Victorian times. The excitement continues for at the top of the hill you come to an elegant fountain and as you reach it the splendour of the mirage which is Waddesdon is revealed as you are led down a long avenue to the turreted roof of an exotic château. This was never a family home but a summer retreat for weekend house parties which attracted the cream of society to wonder at the magnificence of the Rothschild’s.















Waddesdon Manor was built (1874-89) by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to display his outstanding collection of art treasures and to entertain the fashionable world. On a hilltop overlooking the Aylesbury Vale, it is the last remaining complete example of 'le goût Rothschild'. The House combines the highest quality French furniture, textiles and decorative arts from the 18th century with magnificent English portraits and Dutch Old Master paintings.







Fascinated by the history and culture of France, he commissioned a French architect, Gabriel Hippolyte Destailleur, to build him a Renaissance-style château, based on those in the Loire Valley, and employed a French garden designer, Elie Lainé to lay out the grounds. Like other members of his family he wanted a retreat outside London and chose Buckinghamshire because several of his cousins already had houses there (it was known as "Rothschildshire" in the late 19th Century).











The Parterre, which is the last original parterre in England, is dug out every spring and roundly 58,000 thousand fresh plants are planted according to a computer template in a design which like the labels of the Rothschild’s Chateau Mouton changes each year. This year there is a particularly colourful polychromatic design and the reference to Chateau Mouton is not a fanciful metaphor. Under the house is a magnificent wine cellar modelled on the private cellars at Château Lafite-Rothschild and there is a wine shop which carries the full range of Rothschild wines. Fancy a Methuselah?





Parterre





Jacob Rothschild



The patronage of the arts by the Rothschild’s continues with Jacob (Lord) Rothschild being an important patron heading up many organisations, restoring Spencer House in London and commissioning works of art himself.



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2011/04/london-in-spring.html



So each year at Waddesdon there is always a new reason to visit as under his patronage something fresh delights in the House and grounds. So this year there is a contemporary exhibition programme at the Manor launched on 30 March 2011 with Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century at the Coach House, an exhibition on loan from a private collection, generously provided by the Blavatnik Family.





Albert Einstein - A Jew, a radical, a socialist





Golda Meir



Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century



One of Warhol's most important, yet lesser-known series from the 1980s, the Ten Portraits differ from the images of cult figures from the worlds of politics, film and society for which he is perhaps better known. The artist himself referred to the subjects as "Jewish Geniuses" and the series represents a powerful homage to some of the great figures of the last century, including Einstein, Kafka and Freud. The portraits have none of the irony that is so often seen in Warhol's work. Instead, he honours a group of men and women who have come to be recognised as leading names in science and the arts. Only the triple portrait of the Marx Brothers has what, in the subjects' case, is an appropriately humorous tone.





Warhol's Marx Brothers - Chico, Groucho and Harpo



Warhol became fascinated with a group of influential Jewish figures - a pantheon of great thinkers, politicians, performers, musicians and writers including French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923); the first Jewish judge of the United States Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941); renowned philosopher and educator Martin Buber (1878-1965); the theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1897-1955), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century; the hugely influential founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939); vaudeville, stage and film comedians, the Marx Brothers: Chico (1887-1961), Groucho (1890-1977), and Harpo (1888-1964); Israel fourth Prime Minister and one of the founders of the State of Israel, Golda Meir (1898-1978); distinguished American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937); the eminent novelist, Franz Kafka (1883-1924); and avant-garde American writer, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). The collective achievements of this group changed the course of the twentieth century and may be said to have influenced every aspect of human experience.





Andy Warhol by Jack Mitchell ©



The choice might seem a strange one as Andy Warhol's (Andrew Warhola) family were working-class Ukrainian emigrants from Mikó (now called Miková), located in today’s north-eastern Slovakia, then part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and he was a Byzantine Catholic, the Eastern Rite church which is in communion with Rome.



At the time the art world criticised his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled Jewish Geniuses, which Warhol – who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews – had described in his diary as "They're going to sell." The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote at the time: “The way it [the exhibition] exploits its Jewish subjects without showing the slightest grasp of their significance is offensive - or would be, anyway, if the artist had not already treated so many non-Jewish subjects in the same tawdry manner.”



In the same 1980 article Kramer also wrote: “This sort of crass recycling of photographic images has long been one of the standard practices of commercial art, of course? Mr. Warhol has long been a master of the formula, and his talent for making everything he touches both glib and slick shows no slackening in his latest production.”





Sigmund Freud by Andy Warhol





Sarah Bernhardt



In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol's superficiality and commerciality as "the most brilliant mirror of our times," contending that "Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s."



However given his background he was conscious of the heritage of the greatest Jewish community in Mittel Europe which was part of a rich mix of Czech / Jewish and Germanic culture centered on Prague. This great Yiddish culture was destroyed by the Nazi Racist state that in an act of supreme irony preserved its physical remains to act as a museum to their genocidal cleansing. A series of lectures to accompany the exhibition are taking place in September. One, by Dr Maureen Kendler of the London School of Jewish Studies, will discuss notable Jewish contributions to the arts and, in particular, Sarah Bernhardt. Another, by the Dean of the London School of Jewish Studies, Dr Raphael Zarum, will use the Einstein portrait as a starting point to consider if there is a “Jewish science” and to ask questions such as “If Einstein believed in god what kind was it and how did it affect his work?”



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/11/jewish-prague.html



Also in the Stables (which are a scale replica of the Tuileries Palace in Paris) is an exhibition on the new building at Windmill Hill on the Waddesdon estate commissioned by Jacob Rothschild to house the family archives. Now these are somewhat copious as the English Branch has a long history and the Vale of Aylesbury at one stage contained no less than 7 Rothschild Mansions the others being Ascott House (Home of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild), Mentmore Towers (Former home of Lord Roseberry who married into the Rothschild’s and was Prime Minister), Halton House, Aston Clinton House, Tring Manor (Now home to the Walter Rothschild Collection of the Natural History Museum) and Eythrope House which borders Waddesdon and where Jacob(Lord) Rothschild lives.







Also they are intimately involved with the story of Israel, the “Balfour Declaration” was a letter written to a previous Lord Rothschild by the British Foreign Secretary, and they sponsored Jewish settlements in Palestine, housed refugees of the Kinder transport in “The Cedars” opposite Waddesdon and their support for the State of Israel is undoubted including the previous owner of Waddesdon James A. de Rothschild financing the Knesset Building as a gift to the State of Israel. They have also donated the Israeli Supreme Court building.





Betty's traditional ice cream



So there is plenty in the Rothschild Archives and the new Archive, Reading Room and philanthropic centre is housed in a brand new building on the Estate at Windmill Hill. In the stables there is an exhibition about the design of the building, curated by its architect, Stephen Marshall, and the Collection Department at Waddesdon. The display examines the Rothschild family as architectural patrons, charts the development of the building from design to completion, and explores its wider purpose. Architectural models are complemented by spectacular photographs by Richard Bryant, showing the finished building in its landscape. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on the building and Lord Rothschild as an architectural patron by Colin Amery, available in the Manor and Stables shops. It is just about the clearest and best architectural exhibition I’ve been at and I can’t wait to see the archive in the flesh.









Windmill Hill



Stephen Marshall Architect’s new composition overlays a site formerly used as a dairy farm and with the Reading Room and archive stores on one side and the Rothschild Foundation across a central courtyard space, the arrangement makes a direct reference to the agricultural history of the site. Also paying tribute to the location’s working past is the select choice of materials, including oak windows and shutters, rendered walls, wood cladding, and zinc roofs, with walls 1.5m thick in some places to establish a stable internal environment. Vertical louvers previously installed to protect cattle from high winds now provide effective shading to those in the Reading Room.





Mountain (2001), by Anish Kapoor



Continuing the display of contemporary art, Mountain (2001), by celebrated artist Anish Kapoor, is installed in the Aviary at the Manor, on special loan from a private collection. At over 2 metres high, the sculpture is at first sight both monumental and imposing. However, its rugged contours rise up from the ground only to be truncated at a plateau: there is no peak, and the structure is in fact hollow. Kapoor plays with our expectations and sets up contradictions about appearances and reality, presence and ephemerality, offering us what seems to be solid lump of rock that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a void. The 19th-century Pulham rock used in the landscaping around the Aviary throws the artifice of Mountain into even sharper relief.









Anish Kapoor's "Mountain" at the Aviary



So head to Waddesdon this summer for its many delights, its superb contents, its wonderful setting and gardens, its excellent restaurants and retro ice cream van but also for its fresh twist on art and architecture.







For more see;



Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/waddesdon-manor-buckinghamshire.html



Waddesdon in Bloom



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/waddesdon-in-bloom.html



The Dead Zoo at Tring



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/01/dead-zoo-at-tring.html



For details, directions and opening times here is Waddesdon’s website;



http://www.waddesdon.org.uk