The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family

For Mrs Denison, however, whose good sense and sweet temper Christopher had so admired, it was not to be. A letter arrived in November from Denison’s Clerk, Nicholas Dawes, bearing melancholy news. ‘I am Extremely sorry to acquaint you that last Night about nine o’clock it pleased God to take away the Life of Mrs Denison after lying in. She was taken with a Slow fever, under which she laboured ten days, & tho’ under the care of two eminent Physicians, their utmost endeavours proved ineffectual, so that it ended with a Mortification in her Bowels.’26 Denison was heartbroken, ‘incapable of writing’. When he did eventually put pen to paper, it was to his old friend Parson that he turned. ‘I seem,’ he said, ‘to have many Afflictions to struggle with by the removal of those most near and dear to me.’27 It was something that Parson knew about more than most.

Now that Christopher was settled, with a happy marriage and a son and heir, he turned his attention to what was to be the great work of his life: the improvement of Sledmere. Thomas Jeffreys’s Yorkshire Atlas, published in 1771, gives one a rough idea of what the place then looked like, its appearance virtually unchanged since the alterations carried out by Uncle Richard. The house stood in front of a rectangular ‘garden’, with a few trees on either side and the Mere in the middle. To the east lay the Kitchen Garden with its glasshouses. South of the Mere, beyond the ha-ha, ran the main road from York to Bridlington, bisecting the U-shaped belt of trees known as The Avenue. The village was scattered mostly to the east of the house, but there were a few dwellings to the south-west. All around, the Wold land rose up to a height of more than five hundred feet.

In order to understand the full import of the work carried out by Christopher Sykes, which was to eventually earn him the sobriquet ‘Reformer of the Wolds’, it is necessary to understand the nature of the land as it then was. Farming as we know it today did not exist. To the north and south of the village lay a small number of large open arable fields. These were divided into long strips, ‘ridge and furrow’, which were owned by individual farmers. The land owned by a farmer was rarely in one place, his strips being widely distributed across the entire field system, and although he farmed this land himself, the management and regulation of the open fields as a whole were vested in the community and administered through the manorial court. A wide range of crops were grown, on a two- or three-course rotation, with one third of all land lying fallow at any one time; long-eared or sprat barley was grown on the better soils, with naked or wheat barley on the intermediate or less fertile soils. Summer and winter varieties of wheat, including buckwheat or French wheat, were also grown as was massledine, oats, clean rye, beans and peas.28

Beyond the village and its surrounding arable lands lay vast sheep walks which dominated the great expanse of bare upland that was the landscape, ‘open, scarce a bush or tree … for several Miles’.29 Daniel Defoe described the Wolds as being like ‘the plains and downs … of Salisbury’.30 Extensive rabbit warrens were also a characteristic feature of the area, one of the biggest being at Cowlam Farm, just outside Sledmere. This was described by the agriculturalist, William Marshall, writing in 1788, as being ‘the largest upon these Wolds; and probably the most valuable warren in the Island. The … farm contains about nineteen hundred acres; and, generally speaking, it is all warren.’31 Bounded by sod walls, they were an important part of the local economy, on a par with sheep. Each warren supported several thousand pairs of rabbits, yielding between 100,000 and 150,000 couple annually, whose skinned carcasses would be sold for meat in the industrial towns of the West Riding, as well as in local towns such as Hull, Beverley and York. The skins were dried and sold to furriers, whose main markets were the hat manufactories of London and Manchester.

This was all about to change, and the way it was transformed into the landscape that exists today was through enclosure. This was the replacement of the old open-field, strip-farming system, which was increasingly regarded as being outmoded and inefficient, with smaller fields both owned and controlled by one farmer. As the eighteenth century progressed, greater demands were being placed upon agriculture by a rapidly growing population, which rose from six million in 1741 to eight-point-nine million in 1801, and was to nearly double in the next half century. This created a powerful motive to improve productivity and in the minds of modern agricultural thinkers, amongst whom Christopher certainly numbered himself, enclosure was the way forward. It enabled landowners to improve their farming techniques, to consolidate their property into larger farms, and to add to its value by building farmhouses and outbuildings. Enclosed land also steadily rose in value, an important consideration since before 1800 each enclosure required the passing of an individual act of Parliament, making it an expensive business. A valuation carried out by Christopher’s steward, Robert Dunn, in May, 1776, estimated that the land at Sledmere unenclosed was worth between 1s. 3d. and 20s. an acre, rising to 2s.–20s. on enclosure, and 3s. 6d.–20s. after fifteen years.32

Though family legend has always maintained that Christopher was the pioneer in this department, the truth is that he was carrying on a tradition that had been started by his Uncle Richard, when he took in hand the land which formed The Avenue, and later an area to its west, to form the Park. In Richard’s lifetime he spent £40,000 on buying and enclosing land to consolidate the estate. ‘I yesterday signed an Article of Agreement,’ he had written to his brother Joseph in July, 1760, ‘to pay £1,550 for £31 a year net Tythe rent of thirty-six Oxgangs at East Heslerton which is fifty years purchase, but if an inclosure take place may not be too dear.’33 Christopher just did it on a larger scale. He began in 1771, when his account book recorded that he had spent £2,051 on ‘Inclosing’ at East Heslerton, and by 1775 he had instructed Robert Dunn to start on Sledmere. ‘Mr Dunn has perhaps already informed you,’ he wrote to one of his neighbours, Luke Lillingstone, in January, 1776, ‘that I propose to enclose Sledmire’,34 explaining to him that ‘In Sledmire … for some Years past there has not been above 500 Acres in Tillage … but upon the Inclosure the whole will be divided into three large and two smaller farms with not less than 1,500 or 1,600 Acres in Tillage.’35 In his lifetime Christopher was to spend £180,000 on adding 18,000 acres to the estate, and on enclosing and improving the land.

Apart from two estates bought in the early 1770s, at Wetwang and Myton Carr, most of Christopher’s major acquisitions took place in the 1780s, after his father’s death. In the intervening years he concentrated his attention on laying out a new landscape at Sledmere. He had begun planting as early as 1771, when he spent £70. 15s. 7d. on trees, taking delivery of two consignments, one bought from Mr Dixon, the second, larger order from Mr Telford. This was the start of a programme which began on a relatively small scale, with about fifteen acres a year being planted, and became increasingly ambitious. Being young and modern with his finger on the pulse of everything new in the world of science and art he probably found his uncle’s taste dull and outmoded. His earliest attempts at stamping his own ideas on the landscape can be seen in two drawings he made on a single sheet of paper which exists in the Library at Sledmere. The first is of Mr Perfects Design of the Plantations, which depicts the two belts of trees on either side of the Mere. The second shows ‘The alterations of the Plantations’. On the east side, which runs next to the village street, the belt was to be ‘fill’d up with Trees to cover the Houses’, while its inside edge adjoining the Mere was given a ragged, more informal appearance. The belt to the west, adjoining the church, was to be cut into shapes, forming a series of circles and a diamond with, interweaving them, ‘two little Serpentine Walks to Cross the plantation’.36

In 1775 Christopher decided to call in a professional to help him with his schemes: Thomas White, a landscape designer and nurseryman from West Retford near Gainsborough, who had previously worked for the celebrated Capability Brown on two major local projects at Sandbeck, South Yorkshire, and Temple Newsham, near Leeds. In April, 1776, he delivered to Christopher A General Plan for the Improvement of the Grounds at Sledmere, beautifully executed in watercolour on paper mounted on linen. This proposed the building of a new house to be sited directly in front of the existing stables, with the two buildings separated by lawns and a wooded area. It also showed the sites of three yet-to-be-designed farms, each of which would act as an ‘eyecatcher’ at the end of a vista. The plan covered a large area, with shelter belts proposed all round the boundaries and plantations topping the deep dales which are a feature of the Wolds. The most dramatic aspect of the new design was the sweeping away of Uncle Richard’s entire Avenue, leaving the area directly to the south of the house almost totally devoid of trees, and the filling in of the Mere. Although planting had already started on the boundaries, and some of White’s ideas were eventually to be incorporated into the final plan of the landscape, it is evident that Christopher was not entirely happy with the overall design. Though White continued for some years to supply him with trees, he was dropped the following year in favour of his more famous former employer.

On 18 September, 1777, Christopher recorded in his diary that ‘the Great Brown came to Sledmere in the morning early’.37 Lancelot Brown was the best-known landscape designer of the day, the successor to Kent, who died in 1748, and it is a measure of Christopher’s ambition that he chose to employ him. He would certainly have come highly recommended by two Yorkshire neighbours, Edwin Lascelles at Harewood, and Sir William St Quintin at Scampston, both of whose parks he had recently transformed. Brown stayed for a day and although no details exist of exactly what passed between them on this visit, one must assume that he was shown around the grounds and that they discussed what part of the existing landscape was to be retained and incorporated into any new scheme. With the enclosure of Sledmere progressing at a pace, Christopher would have been especially keen to finalise the positioning of the three new farms, to be called Castle, Life Hill and Marramatte. Brown left early the following morning, 19 September, his client’s mind thoroughly concentrated on the great task ahead.

Christopher was a ‘hands on’ gardener who had undoubtedly read Horace Walpole’s essay ‘On Modern Gardening’, written in 1770, in which he had stated his belief that ‘the possessor, if he has any taste, must be the best designer of his own improvements. He sees his situation in all seasons of the year, at all times of the day. He knows where beauty will not clash with convenience, and observes in his silent walks or accidental rides a thousand hints that must escape a person who in a few days sketches out a pretty picture, but has not had leisure to examine the details and relations of every part.’38 He lost no time in getting started, and the very next week found him personally ‘staking out’ a series of new plantations. ‘My method of planting,’ he wrote, ‘is in small holes made in the turf … The holes are made in the autumn at three feet asunder, and eight or ten inches over, returning the soil into the hole at the time of making it with the turf downwards.’ A month later, on 30 October, he ‘began to plant … having prepared several thousand holes’.39 The next day he made a note in his pocket book of an order he had placed with Thomas White for a further 109,500 trees – ‘20,000 seedling Larches, 50,000 Scotch fir seedling, 5,000 Spruce 2y.o, 10,000 Spruce 1y.o, 1,500 Weymouth pine, 2,000 Silver fir, 10,000 Beech seedling, 1,000 Sycamore, and 10,000 seedling Birch of 1 or 2y.o’.40

One of the reasons for the success of Christopher’s planting was that, as in all he did, he had immersed himself in the subject, learning everything that there was to know, and in the process becoming an expert in the chosen field. He understood that the most successful trees were those raised by the proprietor from seedling, taken from the bed exactly when they were required and planted immediately, so that they did not suffer from being out of the ground for too long. To this end he had two nurseries, one at Sledmere, the other at Wheldrake. An endpaper in the diary shows that his immediate requirements were 300,000 trees from White, 136,000 from John and George Telford, nurserymen from York, and 33,000 from William Shiells of Dalkeith, the majority of which would have been seedlings.

It was not only at Sledmere that Christopher had been planting. ‘Mrs S. was taken ill at three,’ reads the last entry in his pocket book for 1777, on 27 December, ‘and delivered between four and five in the morning of a Girl Elizabeth.’41 She was the fourth child born to Bessy since the arrival of Mark in August, 1771, all healthy, and making ‘a pretty little flock’42 as Joseph Denison referred to them in a letter to Parson. A second son, Tatton, named after his mother’s family, had been born on 22 August, 1772, followed by another boy, Christopher, in October, 1774. Their first daughter, Decima Hester Beatrix, was born in December, 1775, and the new-born Elizabeth completed the family.

In spite of the fact that Christopher owned and ran Sledmere and that the family now numbered seven, Parson and Mrs Sykes remained ensconced there, while their son and daughter-in-law were still living at Wheldrake. ‘As we have not met with a house to our satisfaction,’ Christopher had written to his brother-in-law, William Egerton, in December, 1775, ‘we shall probably stay here.’43 They appear to have lived fairly modestly with relatively few servants. There was Styan, the butler; William, Christopher’s valet, who had been with him since his bachelor days; Charlotte, Bessy’s personal maid; various ‘servant women’; a housekeeper; a gardener, Richard Cooper; a coachman, and a full time nanny, Nurse Moore, who was to be the longest serving member of the household. At the various times of Bessy’s pregnancies, the account book also shows payments to ‘Nurses’ and, in 1775, to a ‘Wet Nurse’.

Christopher did not keep a detailed diary recounting the events of his life, but in a series of little pocket books, sometimes ‘Goldsmith’s Almanack’ or perhaps ‘The Ladies Own Memorandum Book, or Daily Pocket Journal’, he briefly noted down his guests and dining companions, financial and estate matters, memoranda of servants, his travels, notes about gardening, etc., In the midst of which trivia are the occasional poignant reminders of more important personal matters. ‘Mrs Sykes miscarried for the first time in her life after a months severe illness,’44 ran the entry for 15 December, 1779, for example, while on 22 March, 1778, ‘Little Tom Tatton, my Brother’s Son died suddenly.’45 Reading through some of the other entries for 1778, the first year of Elizabeth Sykes’s life, one gets some idea of the domestic life of Christopher and Bessy.

There are few entries during the first six months, other than Christopher going back and forth to Sledmere. On 12 June, they set off on holiday, not to London or the Continent, but to the nearby east coast town of Bridlington, a popular resort for the newly fashionable pastime of sea bathing. ‘Wife and Self dined at Sledmere,’ he wrote. ‘Got to Hilderthorpe at night. Servants dined at Wetwang.’ Hilderthorpe, a coastal village to the south of Bridlington, was part of Christopher’s estates and the site of the family’s summer retreat, Flat Top Farm, since 1776. This was a three-storey house, built upon rising ground above Bridlington Bay and commanding magnificent views out to sea. The ground and top floors consisted of permanent accommodation for the tenant farmer, while the first floor, which had an octagonal salon and well-proportioned lodging rooms, was reserved for the occasional use of the family. It is important because it was almost certainly the first house designed by Christopher, being remarkably similar to other architectural drawings made by him in the Library at Sledmere.

On this occasion they stayed at Hilderthorpe for a month, and on 13 July, Christopher recorded ‘I went to Sledmere to dinner. Wife went to Wheldrake.’ Nineteen August found them in the midst of a house party. ‘Wheldrake. Mr and Miss Sarrandes, Mr and Mrs Daniel, Miss Simpson, Miss Collings, Mr and Mrs Paul, Wife and self fished in the old River, dined, drank tea and danced upon the rugs.’ A charming scene, repeated the following day. ‘All the above drank tea and danced upon the grass.’ On 31 August, Christopher rode over to Sledmere for dinner and ‘sent Styan to wait for Mr Brown at Wetwang.’ He did not turn up and finally arrived on 5 September. ‘Mr Brown came this morning and we rode about, dined and lodged at Wetwang.’ Brown left the next day. ‘I returned home to dinner, met my Wife and Tatton,’ noted Christopher. Ten days later the whole family visited Sledmere and also on 16 September ‘Wife and Self went to Castle Howard. Dined there, drank tea at Eddlethorpe Grange and returned to Sledmere at night.’ They stayed for a week and on 24 September ‘Wife, self and children returned to Wheldrake at night.’

A curious letter written at this time from Christopher to an old Oxford tutor, the Revd William Cleaver, throws some light on the education of his children. Evidently the boys had a tutor at Wheldrake, who had been teaching them to read. He was, however, on the point of leaving, and in asking Cleaver to help him find a replacement, Christopher made it quite clear that he was unhappy with the way the children spoke, a sign that in the aristocratic society to which he aspired, local dialects were beginning to be frowned upon. ‘The person who has had the instruction of my Children hitherto is going into another line of life,’ he wrote on 15 September, ‘indeed he is no loss as he has done them all the Good he is capable of which was to teach them to read English tho’ but Ill. If you know of any Young Man you think fit to Succeed him, who can correct their Yorkshire tone and instruct them to Your Wishes (I am sure it will be to mine) I wish you would let me know to continue with them till you and he think they are fit for School.’46 On 6 October, 1778, Christopher noted in his diary, ‘Master Tatton and Christopher went to Mr Simpson to be under his care.’ They were aged six and four respectively.

‘The Great Brown’s’ return in September bore fruit when, two months later in November, he produced his ‘Plan for the intended Alterations at Sledmere’. Christopher immediately preferred it to White’s plan because, while new plantations encircled the Park to its south and west, the design incorporated much of the existing landscape, retaining all the southern portion of The Avenue and thinning out the section nearer to the house into a series of clumps. The Mere and the buildings around the house remained unaltered. So far as the positions of the three ‘eyecatcher’ farmsteads proposed by White were concerned, Brown was greatly helped by the fact these were already partly built.

‘I do not at present see any probability of being freed from my engagements at an earlier period,’ wrote Christopher in September, 1778 to a friend, ‘by the constant attention I have paid to the Wolds having built fourteen dwelling houses with several Barns and Stables.’ The most important of these new buildings were the three farms which would form the focus of the new vistas. The first of these appeared as an entry in his diary for 13 July, 1778, when he noted ‘begun Castle’. Situated a mile or so to the south-east of the main house, and today my own home, Castle Farm was designed by John Carr of York, the best-known architect in the north of England. The design took the form of a Gothic gatehouse, with neo-classical wings – which were never completed. Work on it moved fast and on 3 September, two days before Brown’s second visit to Sledmere, Christopher scribbled ‘finished the Castle brickwork’.

The other two farms, Life Hill, to the south-west of the main house and Marramatte, to the north-west, were designed by Christopher himself, who drew up two sets of drawings for them, both working and presentation. These show him to have been a skilled draughtsman with a good architectural knowledge and a genuine ability to design. They were not just cribbed from one of the many pattern books available at the time, such as Thomas Lightoler’s The Gentleman and Farmers Architect, but were his own ideas, cleverly combining the need for the houses to look beautiful while at the same time preserving their practical function as agricultural buildings. The charming pavilions at Life Hill, for example, which have pilasters on their gable ends and stand to the right and left of the farm house, are barns, and at Marramatte, the gable ends of the farm buildings also form pavilions, which have pilasters and oculi.

In the end neither White’s nor Brown’s schemes were adopted, though elements from both were used and they may have served as an inspiration, because Christopher’s own ideas were on a far grander scale than anything either of them envisaged. They were more akin to those of the essayist Joseph Addison, who in 1710 had written ‘Why may not a whole estate be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent plantations? A man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions.’47 Christopher’s vision was indeed to turn his whole estate into a Park, to extend his woodlands and plantations so that they enhanced not only the surrounds of the house, but the entire agricultural landscape. He dreamed of creating a Paradise amongst the bleak hills of the Wolds. To this end, after he received Brown’s plan, he indulged in a veritable orgy of planting, covering 130 acres in the 1778–1779 season, the largest area planted in the whole of the forty years it was to take to complete the landscape. His ‘account of Trees planted at Sledmere’, given to the local agriculture society, listed all the species used – ‘forty Wild Cherry, sixty Mountain Ash, 300 Yews, 358 Silver Fir, 500 Weymouth Pine, 600 Birch, 1,540 Oak, 6,400 Holly, 12,000 Beech, 25,260 Spruce, 33,600 Ash, 42,122 Scotch Fir and 54,430 Larch’.48 In recognition of his ‘having planted the greatest quantity of Larch Trees’, the secretary, William Ellis, wrote to tell him that ‘you are entitled to make choice of any Book or set of Books not exceeding the price of Five Guineas’.49

When John Bigland toured Yorkshire at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, his description of Sledmere showed precisely how great a transformation of the landscape had taken place in the relatively short time that Christopher Sykes had lived there.

Sledmere is situated in a spacious vale, in the centre of the Yorkshire Wolds, and may be considered as the ornament of that bleak and hilly district. All the surrounding scenery displays the judicious taste of the late and present proprietors: the circumjacent hills are adorned with elegant farm houses covered with blue slate, and resembling villas erected for the purpose of rural retirement. The farms are in as high a state of cultivation as the soil will admit; and in the summer the waving crops in the fields, the houses of the tenantry elegantly constructed, and judiciously dispersed, the numerous and extensive plantations skirting the slopes of the hills, and the superb mansion with its ornamented grounds, in the centre of the vale, form a magnificent and luxuriant assemblage, little to be expected in a country like the Wolds; and to a stranger on his sudden approach, the coup d’oeil is singularly novel and striking.50

It was a fitting tribute to Christopher’s great vision.

CHAPTER III The Architect

In February, 1783, the month in which the American War of Independence finally drew to a close, Christopher received a letter from his brother-in-law, William. ‘My Sister mentioned in her last’,’ he wrote, ‘that you were looking for a House, I hope you have heard of one by this time that will be comfortable for you at the present, I can’t help wishing very much that the Doctor wou’d give up Sledmere to you, but I conclude that is out of the question.’1 If only for one reason, this was true: Parson was now an old man in his seventies and suffered from poor health. He had seen little of his son in the previous few years, who, as a result of the war, had taken up a commission as a Captain in Colonel Henry Maister’s Regiment, the East Yorkshire Militia, though while away from home, Christopher had been kept informed as to his father’s condition from regular letters sent to him by the Sledmere butler, John Hopper. Parson suffered constantly from pains in his chest, regular spasms and dreadful gout. ‘He is very Low Spirited and Eats very little,’2 Hopper wrote in April, 1782, though there were the occasional good days. ‘I have the pleasure to acquaint you,’ wrote Hopper on 15 August, ‘that your Father got out an Airing last Saturday and has continued it every day since, he was at Church on Sunday.’ In a memoir written by my grandfather, he recalled meeting, when he was a child, an old lady who remembered seeing Parson at church, ‘a little old man with a powdered wig carried into Sledmere Church on his footman’s back’.3