MADRESFIELD
Madresfield Court played a significant
part in nurturing the Arts and Crafts
movement, as well as providing material
for Evelyn Waugh’s novel,
Brideshead Revisited.
Helen Morgan reports:
This moated stately home has been in the Lygon family for 900 years and is home to the 29th generation of that family. But it was not always as majestic or as opulent as it is now. When a distant relative, William Jennens, died in 1798, aged 97, he left estate valued at £2 million and an unsigned will. He had never married and had no immediate heirs. The lack of a legal will resulted in one of England’s lengthiest court cases. Jennens and Jennens ran for more than 100 years, inspiring Charles Dickens’s story of the Dedlock family’s conflicting wills in his novel Bleak House. Eventually Jennens’s estate was devolved on three remote relatives. One of these was William Lygon, then in his fifties with a wife and 10 children. He was the owner of the estate and seat of Madresfield about three miles from Malvern. Lygon secured his portion of the Jennens inheritance by stages, despite repeated legal challenges. The great wealth it eventually brought set both his family and Madresfield on a completely unexpected trajectory. The original building had been substantially rebuilt and enlarged in Tudor times. Once the Lygons had the Jennens legacy in its coffers, however, its upgrade took off in the 19th century under the auspices of the architect Philip Hardwick. The old entrance block remained but the windows and roof were replaced. A chapel, bell tower, library and large reception rooms were added within the moated area, all examples of the Arts & Crafts movement, leaving just a modest patch for a garden. The library contains about 8,000 books and was designed by CR Ashbee who commissioned much of the carving, decorative doors and bookcase ends. The books themselves contain many examples from William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. The chapel was decorated in egg tempura by Henry Payne with his assistants, Joseph Sanders, Dick Stubington and Henry Rushberry. The altar cross is by Arthur and Georgie Gaskin and the triptych designed by William Bidlake and painted by Charles Gere. As Charles Ryder, the narrator in Brideshead Revisited noted: “More even than the work of great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries.”
The history society’s visit to Madresfield on June 24th is part of the summer programme. Lectures resume in September.
This Month
