Beginning in the 1100s the Scot Family built a stone and timber house on the site, traces of which still survive today .
Around 1300, they converted the house into a larger stone Manor House. This had a large communal hall on the first floor with stone fireplaces and service rooms below.
The family eventually took the name of Calverley as their own and for 500 years the Calverley family remained in situ. Many were knighted or served as magistrates and later as county sheriffs (originally Anglo Saxon ‘Shire-Reeves’).
In the 1480s, William Calverley built an even larger great hall alongside the 14thC house which was solely for the family’s private use. The new great hall survives today, complete with its mostly original hammer-beam roof and enormous stone fireplace. The tracery of medieval windows remains embedded in the walls.
In April 1605, serious personal disaster struck the Calverley family. Overwhelmed by debt and doubting his wife’s faithfulness, another heir Walter Calverley, a known alcoholic, murdered his two small sons. He was caught on his way to kill his third infant. Unrepentant but refusing to enter a plea, Walter was executed in York by being literally pressed to death under heavy stones. Because he didn’t confess the family kept their lands.
In the early 1700s the Old Hall began to be subdivided as weavers’ cottages.
In 1754, the ancient link between Calverley and the Calverleys came to an end when Sir Walter Calverley Blackett sold the Calverley estate to Thomas Thornhill of Fixby. The Old Hall was further divided into cottages, and by 1861 there were 11 separate households living on the site. Even the small chapel was converted to a house.
1981, the Landmark Trust stepped in to keep this Grade 1 Listed medieval manor house in single ownership and started the long journey of restoring the whole site. The repaired former lodging block opened as a Landmark holiday let in 1982, while the life tenancies of the sitting tenants were allowed to play out. Restoration work has revealed coloured walls with 16thC Tudor paintings of abstract laughing birds, growling griffins, and little torsos of men sitting on vases, all based on a decoration that Emperor Nero had in his Golden Villa . Also found are a centuries-old bonnet, children’s shoes and ‘witch bottle’ found behind walls, probably to ward off spirits.
More about the hall here..
Paul A. McKendrick UK 