| Shenton Hall | |
|---|---|
 Shenton Hall in 2002, seen beyond the gatehouse from the churchyard of St John the Evangelist. | |
| Location | Shenton, Leicestershire, England |
| Coordinates | 52°35'57.0"N 1°25'46.1"W |
Shenton Hall is a country house within the village of Shenton, in Leicestershire, England. It is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II* listed building. [1]
Shenton was first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as 'Scentone', where it is recorded as being owned by the magnate, administrator and landowner Henry de Ferrers. [2]
William Wollaston, born in 1581, purchased the 2,300-acre (930 ha) estate at Shenton in 1626. Wollaston was born in 1581, and had inherited the fortune of his father Henry Wollaston in 1616, who was an affluent draper. He married Anne Worsley in 1614, and following her death, married Anne Whitgreve in 1616, in Westminster. By 1629, Wollaston had begun the construction of Shenton Hall in the Jacobean style for him, his second wife Anne, and their two sons. [3] Wollaston incorporated the datestone WW 1629 into the gatehouse. [1] In the same year, he was appointed High Sheriff of Leicestershire. [4] During the English Civil War, Wollaston was thought to have had royalist sympathies, given his appointment of High Sheriff in 1629. [5]
William Wollaston survived his first son Henry at his death in December 1666. Thus, his second son - also named William - inherited Shenton Hall. He married Elizabeth Cave during the 1600s, and had two daughters, Anne and Rebecca, that survived into adulthood. Like his father, William Wollaston was appointed High Sheriff of Leicestershire in 1672. [6] His eldest daughter, Anne, married Sir John Chester in 1686 at Shenton, and believed that they would inherit Shenton Hall. At her father's death in August 1688, though he bequeathed large sums to both his daughters, Shenton was passed to a male cousin, the priest, writer and philosopher also named William Wollaston. [7]
William Wollaston, the cousin, only received the reversion of Shenton Hall, meaning that it would presumably return to the male heir of Anne and Sir John Chester. Sir John Chester and Anne Chester continued to live at Shenton Hall, even after Wollaston's death in 1724, when his widow Mrs. Wollaston owned the house. Sir John Chester eventually inherited Chicheley Hall, and moved there to rebuilt it in the Baroque style. [8]
The house was greatly extended to the rear in 1862. The Wollastons occupied the house until 1940. During World War II the army took possession and the prisoners of war were accommodated on the estate. [9]
The entry for the Grade II* listing from Historic England reads:
House. c.1620 but doubled in size in the mid C19...brick with stone dressings and plain tiled roof. Entrance front of three storeys and six bays, asymmetrical. The outer bays are segmental full height bay windows set beneath coped gables, and the central bay is a full height canted bay window which contains the former doorway, now a window. Four light mullioned and transomed windows on each floor to its left, along with a side wall stack. ... High parapet runs between the outer gables. Main entrance now in eastern elevation in full height bay, part of the Victorian additions, in a Jacobean style with segmentally arched doorway and strapwork relief decoration above. Victorian range echoes the style of the original, but on a bigger scale, using large mullioned and transomed windows, departing from the domestic scale only with a machicolated tower at the western angle. [10]
The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote about the notable "chimneypiece of 1649, carved with hunting and biblical scenes " that is fixed in the sitting-room next to the drawing-room on the south-east front. Commenting more generally on the house, he remarked that it has a "romantic, distinctly Victorian silhouette". [11]
William Wollaston was a school teacher, Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a major Enlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated. He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
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