The 1900-year History of Goldsborough and the Hall

60AD:- Standing Stone: In the graveyard behind Goldsborough Church adjoining the Hall, is a Standing Stone that is believed to be a place where people came to trade and pay taxes in ancient times.

700-1050:-The Goldsborough Hoard: Coins and artefacts dating from 700 to 1050 were discovered in 1859 during construction outside the north wall of Goldsborough Church. The hoard, now held at the British Museum in London, contains fragments of Viking brooches and arm-rings, together with 39 coins and forms one of the largest collections ever discovered in the UK.

1086:- The Domesday Book: describes the village of Goldsborough as Godenesburg, possibly meaning ‘the place of Gods’ or the ‘fortification of Godswin’.

1250-1588:- The Goldsborough Family: By the middle of the 13th century the Goldsborough family lived in a thatched moated manor house at the opposite end of the village which was destroyed by fire after a family feud in 1588.

1601:- Sir Richard Hutton: (knighted 1617), a prominent London lawyer, whose sons became the MP for Knaresborough and High Sheriff of Yorkshire, purchased the village and all claimants to its land and started construction of Goldsborough Hall on raised land close to the church.

1625:- Goldsborough Hall was completed. The hall was built on three storeys in red brick with limestone coigns and dressing. Its great oak staircase was lit by two stone mullioned windows. The Library with its fabulous 17th-century oak-panelling has retained its original magnificent painted plasterwork ceiling. The massive stone fireplace in Sir Richard Hutton Dining Room has two over-mantel panels in bas-relief depicting scenes from the Old Testament and potentially dates from the 16th century.

1695:- Captain Byerley: The Hall passed through the female side of the family into the Byerley family when the granddaughter of Richard Hutton, Mary Wharton, married her first cousin Robert Byerley.

1706:- The Byerley Turk: This horse was the first of three stallions that make up all thoroughbreds in the world today. Colonel Robert Byerley captured this fine brown charger from a Turkish officer at the battle of Buda in Hungary in 1688. The stallion became Byerley’s war horse and later, in 1690, saved his life at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. After Captain Byerley’s marriage, the Byerley Turk came with him to Goldsborough Hall where it retired at stud and covered many mares. The Byerley Turk died in 1706 and is said to have been buried in the grounds beneath a tree. The 300-year old copper beech near the old stable block could well mark the spot.

1753:- Lascelles purchased the village and the hall: None of Robert and Mary Byerley’s children had any heirs and in the mid-1700s the Hall was bought by Daniel Lascelles (whose family later became the Earls of Harwood). With this purchase, Goldsborough Hall moved into a new phase of its life and was extensively remodelled by John Carr of York and Robert Adam during their work on the construction of Harewood House for his brother. The main alteration was the addition of the bays extending upwards towards the roof, with windows on every floor and balustrades at the top. They created a new main entrance to the house facing east. Carr and Adam’s features can be seen throughout and include the decorative cornice and marble fireplace in Princess Mary’s Drawing Room and decorative columns and cornice in the Sir Richard Hutton Dining Room. The Lascelles’ crest of a chained bear’s head appears in a stone panel over the front entrance and also on the lead rain-water pipes around the building.

1784:- Daniel Lascelles died without an heir and the Hall and all of its land passed to his brother, to form part of the then 24,000-acre Harewood estate. For the next 170 years the Hall remained within the Lascelles family, being used as a Dower House, the heirs-in-waiting house, a hunting lodge, or even rented out when not needed.

1922:- Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, married Henry Lascelles (later the 6th Earl of Harewood) and made Goldsborough Hall their first family home and country residence. The couple lived at Goldsborough before their move to Harewood House in the 1930s following the death of the 5 th Earl. Princess Mary made a number of changes to the house and details can still be seen in the stone fireplace in the Dining Room and stained glass windows on the staircase depicting the union of the Lascelles and the Royal Family. On the second floor there are also some stained glass windows, which were given by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on the occasion of the Princess’s wedding. In the garden a vista was created to the south with the planting of the walled terrace, the beech avenue centred around Princess Mary’s sundial and looking on to the Lime Tree Walk, which was planted by visiting members of the Royal family and surrounded by 50,000 daffodils in the spring. To the south east of the formal garden is a copse of Japanese cherry trees which were a wedding gift from the Emperor of Japan.

1939:- Oatlands School: During the Second World War, Oatlands School, (now the site of St Aidan’s School), Harrogate was stationed at the Hall. After the war the school remained at the Hall, purchasing it from the Harewood estate in 1951 following the death of the 6 th Earl of Harewood. However, when the school’s owners, the Boyer family retired in 1961, the school closed.

1947:- The 6th Earl of Harewood: Princess Mary’s husband died in 1947, leaving massive death duties. This, coupled with the death of his father 17 years earlier and the end of the Second World War, forced the Lascelles family to sell the Goldsborough Estate a few years later, thus ending over 200 years of family ownership.

1952:- The Goldsborough Estate is sold at auction, ending over 1000 years of the estate village. The Hall was privately sold to the Boyers, who ran Oatlands School, the year before.

1961-1977:- The Hanson Family: In 1961 purchased the Hall from the school which had closed down, modernising the building and returning it to a private residence. In 1977, due to ill health, the Hanson family sold the Hall to the developers West & Sons, Leeds.

1979-2003:- The Smith Family: The Hall was briefly converted to a country house hotel that never opened before being purchased by Russell Stansfield Smith in 1979. The Smith family lived in the Hall for a few years as a family home before converting it into a nursing home. The home opened in 1983 and become the flagship for the Goldsborough Estates group of nursing homes throughout the UK. The group was sold to BUPA in 1997. In 2003 BUPA closed the nursing home as the Grade II* listed status of the Hall meant it could no longer be kept to modern nursing standards and placed the Hall up for sale.

2005:- The Oglesby Family: After 18 months of negotiations the Hall was saved from developers and purchased by local couple Mark and Clare Oglesby (the youngest son of the famous salmon angler Arthur Oglesby) who, with children Lucy and Charlotte and Hungarian sheepdog George, returned the Hall once more to a privately owned family residence. With a vision to secure the Hall’s future Mark and Clare hope to find a better use for the building which will allow it to remain a private residence, with its history preserved for the future.

HELP:- Over the last 400 years Goldsborough Hall has attracted a lot of attention. In piecing together this history we have relied on help from local people. If you have any memories, documents or photographs of the building old or new, we would love to hear from you, so that we can preserve as much of the history of the building as possible.

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