Burton Agnes Hall

Burton Agnes Hall is an Elizabethan manor house in the village of Burton Agnes, near Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was built by Sir Henry Griffith in 1601–10 to designs attributed to Robert Smythson. There is an older Norman Manor House, originally built in 1173 on an adjacent site; both buildings are now Grade I listed buildings.

The Hall contains a number of fine 17th century plaster ceilings and chimneypieces. The ceiling of the Long Gallery was restored in two stages by Francis Johnson between 1951 and 1974. This house was planned by Robert Smythson. The plan is basically a square block with bay windows and a small internal courtyard. All of the display has been concentrated on the facade. This includes many windows and many shaped projecting bays, two square in the center, two semicircular at the sides, and two five-sided around the corners. The variety in the skyline is created by gables and level parapets.

The main facade is built a story higher than the rest of the house in order to contain a long gallery running the full length of the second floor. However, this makes the side facades asymmetric because it would be higher at one end than the other. This building makes the main facade known, seeing that all the other facades are not as extravagant.

The two square projecting bays in the centre of the front contain the porch and the bay window at the screens end of the hall. The centre two square projecting bays contain the porch and the bay window. This was a traditional arrangement from a frontal view, exactly the same size or treatment, with the doorway to the porch placed where it does not show, not in the front but in the side of its projection; in this way symmetry is preserved.

The main rooms vary in size due to the recessions of the bay windows but the main focus of the house is the Long Gallery, which runs the length of the main front and covered by a wagon-roofed and richly plastered ceiling. The “great chamber.” now divided into two, was placed on the first floor above the parlour. Even though the house has been through many renovations, a great deal of seventeenth-century fittings still remain such as carved woodwork, plaster and alabaster.

Robert Smythson heavily influenced Burton Agnes Hall, however comparing the Smythson plan with the house as built it is clear there are several differences. In the plan all four of the great bay windows at the corners of the main front are five-sided but in the building two are semicircular. The central bay of the east front has dropped out, the corner bays of the north front have become square, and the whole of the west front has been much altered. Also, the door of the porch is shown in the plan frontal instead of at the side.

These variations make it impossible that the plan could be only a survey of the house. It must be at any rate the first version of an original plan produced by Smythson for Sir Henry Griffiths. It is difficult to say how far the variations in the existing house are due to second thoughts on the part of Smythson himself. how far to alterations made by the Griffiths or the masons and carpenters who actually built the house. The semicircular windows were very probably Smythson’s own contributions, for such windows appear prominently in two of his other plans. But it is possible that he planned a house with a level parapet, and of the same height throughout, and that these features were altered or omitted by a conservative patron.

The gardens boast 3,000 plant species and include the National Collection of Campanulas. The walled flower garden has a games motif with a central chess board played on black and white paving stones. Other games include draughts, snakes and ladders and hoop toss. Each of these games is in a separate garden surrounded by plants selected by flower colours. There is also a market garden area with attractively planted seasonal vegetables. Whimsical statues abound throughout the grounds. Various artists work rotates through the grounds and galleries regularly. A woodland walk is well known locally for abundant snowdrop blooms in February.

Both the Elizabethan hall and the remains of the old Grade I listed manor house are open to the public throughout the year.