History
The estate has been in the hands of the same family since Roger de Stuteville first built a manor house on the site in 1173. In 1457 Sir Walter Griffith came to live there. The Griffiths were a Welsh family who had emigrated to Staffordshire in the thirteenth century and inherited the Burton Agnes estate.
The present Elizabethan house was built nearby in 1601–10 by Sir Henry Griffith, 1st Baronet, after he was appointed to the Council of the North. His daughter Frances Griffith, heiress of the estate, married Sir Matthew Boynton, Governor of Scarborough Castle and the first Boynton baronet. On her death in 1634 the estate was bequeathed to their son Francis, later the second Baronet Boynton.
The widow of the 6th Baronet married John Parkhurst of Catesby Abbey, Northamptonshire, known as "Handsome Jack", who squandered much of the family fortune and neglected the estate.
On the death of the eleventh Baronet in 1899 the house passed to his daughter, who had married Thomas Lamplugh Wickham, and who had adopted the additional surname of Boynton. On her death it passed in turn to their son Sir Marcus Wickham Boynton, who operated a successful stud farm on the estate for many years. He died in 1989 and left the property to a distant cousin, Simon Cunliffe-Lister, then aged twelve, grandson of Viscount Whitelaw and son of the 3rd Earl of Swinton. Today, the estate is owned by the Burton Agnes Preservation Trust and is managed by Cunliffe-Lister and his mother, Hon Susan Whitelaw.
A Hall Class railway engine was named Burton Agnes Hall, and is preserved at Didcot Railway Centre.
Read more about this topic: Burton Agnes Hall
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