Could it be the most enduring court sanction in British legal history?
On 26 August, 1600, Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby and his wife, Lady Margaret, had some unexpected callers at Hackness Hall, their Yorkshire home a few miles from Scarborough. Presuming upon this couple’s hospitality, half-a-dozen young county gentry – ostensibly a hunting party, headed by William Eure – announced themselves in need of an overnight billet and were sure that the Hobys would be pleased to oblige.
An unabashed Puritan prig, Sir Thomas had himself been something of a pushy presence locally since his 1596 marriage to the most eligible heiress in the North Riding, mistrusted as a southern carpetbagger (maybe even an anti-Catholic spy). With menace aforethought, the self-invited guests quickly set about affronting the Hobys’ pious household with card games, drunken carousing, and mounting verbal and physical abuse; windows would be smashed as the riotously disrespectful party departed the following morning.
As an energetic, experienced litigant Hoby now sought redress from the various families and, doubtful of a fair hearing locally, brought suit against the six at the Court of Star Chamber in London. The ‘scandalous and damaging’ proceedings were the talk of the town through 1601 (Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, featuring po-faced Malvolio’s merry torment at the hands of a drunken Sir Toby Belch and company, debuting the following year). Handing down its verdict, Star Chamber ruled unanimously in Hoby’s favour: the Eures were ordered to pay their victim £100 a year in perpetuity, ‘their accomplices smaller fines on the same terms’.1
Amongst the latter was one Stephen Hutchinson, heir to the Wykeham Abbey estate (left) five miles south of Hackness Hall. Hutchinson’s mother was the daughter of Sir John Dawnay, to which family Wykeham Abbey would (somewhat improbably) descend two centuries on. Rather remarkably, over ‘400 years later, the Dawnays still pay £60 annually to Hackness [private seat of the Lords Derwent] for what in their accounts is called the ‘Wykeham shame’.1
The website of Dawnay Estates carries the crowned and collared lion from the family crest. However, the mansion which still displays the Dawnay arms in their full splendour is not Wykeham Abbey – ‘an exceptionally interesting house seldom open to the public’ – but another, some fifty miles south-west of Wykeham as the crow flies. Cowick Hall, the original seat of the Dawnays (later viscounts Downe), would eventually be disposed of as, indeed, were a boggling array of stately piles, variously acquired, leaving Wykeham Abbey – long the Cinderella of the bunch – as the locus of the Dawnay family from the second decade of the 20th century.
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Despite the taint of his association with the Hackness affair, by 1626 Stephen Hutchinson’s reputation had been sufficiently rehabilitated to allow his election to parliament as the MP for Scarborough. In the sixteenth century the Hutchinsons had been among those yeoman families to take advantage of the superabundance of land in the wake of the Dissolution. Stephen had succeeded his father, Edward, in 1591 and is regarded as a likely builder of the house at Wykeham Abbey (on the site of a former Cistercian priory) sketched by Samuel Buck circa 1720.
‘Of steep gables, and reasonably commodious,’2 it was essentially ‘a typical I-shaped house, with a central range and cross-wings at each end,’ and would seem to now remain little altered until the later decades of the eighteenth century.3
A low-profile Parliamentarian in the Civil War, Stephen Hutchinson’s will of 1646 pointedly left his son merely an annuity of £140, Royalist Edward having “thereby incurred my displeasure“. The Wykeham estate would pass instead to Stephen’s grandson, Edward, Jnr., who died c.1687.
Meanwhile, over in Yorkshire’s East Riding, Sir John Dawnay (d.1493) – on the winning side at the Battle of Bosworth in the previous conflict to rent England asunder – had been rewarded with the stewardship of royal hunting ground east of Snaith at Cowick, by the River Aire between Pontefract and Goole. An area once ‘so dank, misty, ungenial, the Celts deserted it, the Angles would not invade it’4, the Dawnays would remain ‘of Cowick’ for nearly four hundred years, albeit for the most part as Crown leaseholders (before striking a deal with Queen Victoria in 1852).5
Of a knightly line stretching back to the Conquest, Sir John Dawnay (d.1695) consolidated his family’s steady ascent with the acquisition of an Irish peerage, being created 1st Viscount Downe in 1681 and marking the moment with a smart new mansion at Cowick. (By this time the Dawnays had also procured the North Yorkshire moorland manor of Danby Castle and through marriage had also come into a sizable landholding at Sessay, fifty miles north of Cowick.)

Samuel Buck c.1720
‘[Viscount Downe’s] house is of great interest as one of the largest built in Yorkshire in the years immediately following the Restoration, and as one of the most architecturally ambitious built in the country in the second half of the 17th century.’ No architect has been ascribed, while ‘the plan does not follow the more advanced post-Restoration houses pioneered by Roger Pratt and Hugh May’.6
At about the time Cowick Hall was completed, over at Wykeham Abbey Edward Hutchinson was making a marriage which, whilst further expanding their Yorkshire landholdings, would in time lead to the loss of the Hutchinson family name. For Mary Langley’s brother subsequently nominated his nephew – the couple’s second son, Richard – as his heir to the Langley estate at North Grimston (twenty miles south-west of Wykeham) on condition he thenceforth took the Langley name. This Richard Langley would in due course also inherit Wykeham Abbey at the death of his childless elder brother, Edward Hutchinson, in 1737.
Fifty miles away at Cowick, the death of the 2nd Viscount Downe’s son just a year before his own would see the Dawnay estates pass to teenage grandson Henry in 1741. ‘With a large independent fortune, [Henry] conceived a rage for the army,’ lamented Horace Walpole of an enthusiasm which would prematurely claim the life of ‘one of the most amiable men in the world’. But not before the 3rd viscount had enlisted Doncaster-based architect James Paine to give Cowick Hall the deceptive classical appearance it has retained to this day.
Work began in 1752, Paine’s first major intervention being a somewhat anachronistic modification of the north (entrance) front (r). ‘The old centrepiece was replaced by a three-bay pediment of notably convincing 17th-century character,’ and proudly displaying the Dawnay family crest. ‘His principal contribution…
… was, however, to have been two flanking wings’ but the young viscount’s ‘rage’ for action would bring about the curtailment of this grand project.7 Having heroically survived the Battle of Minden in August 1759, unmarried Henry Dawnay succumbed to injuries incurred at Campen the following year, aged thirty-three. He was succeeded by his brother, John, 4th Viscount Downe, whose three sons were to separately inherit country house estates, one of which would be…
… Wykeham Abbey where, soon after he came of age in 1782, Richard Langley’s grandson, Richard (2), would set about Georgianizing the house inside and out.
Infilling between the wings front and back, the north front now featured four central bays beneath a pediment (coach-house wing extensions being added a decade on) while the garden front now received a full-height centre bow. ‘The interior was given a clearly Classical character, new Venetian windows [being] added to the staircase and long gallery,’ and the introduction of several decorative chimneypieces. Improvements in the grounds included the creation of the ha-ha in 1789.3
Married but without children, Richard Langley would reach back into the recesses of his family tree to find an heir. Langley’s mother was a granddaughter of Henry Dawnay, 2nd Viscount Downe, one of whose grandsons, Marmaduke Dawnay (the third son of the 4th viscount) was now anointed. Thus in 1824 – after the death of Langley’s widow – a newly-styled Marmaduke Langley duly became squire of the Wykeham Abbey estate.
Now if this turn of events had been unlikely it would be trumped three years on when Marmaduke’s brother, William, was randomly gifted splendid Beningbrough Hall (r), midway between the Dawnay estates at Cowick and Sessay. Longtime seat of the Bourchier family, Margaret Earle found herself the last of this line having lost both sons in the Napoleonic wars. As an old and close friend of the eldest of these, Rev. William Dawnay, 55, was bequeathed Beningbrough in 1827. He would live there for the remainder of his life notwithstanding the fact that, just five years on, following the death of his older brother, John, the one-time Rector of Sessay now also ascended to be master of the Dawnay estates, and the 6th Viscount Downe.
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In their time the 4th and 5th viscounts had significantly expanded the family’s Yorkshire landholdings by purchase; John Dawnay (d.1832) would also engage architect Joseph Bonomi to modify Cowick Hall during his half-century as squire. And, though comparatively brief, the tenure of the 7th viscount, Rev. William’s son, William (d.1857), was remarkable for ‘vigorous building activity’ under the direction of high-church architect William Butterfield, and some spectacular (if outwardly somewhat gratuitous) property acquisitions.8
In 1854 the North Yorkshire Baldersby Park estate, 8 miles west of Sessay, was snapped up (for £196,000) in the fire sale following the downfall of ‘railway king’ George Hudson. At its heart stood an important house (right, originally called Newby Park) designed by Colen Campbell, ‘the first villa to be built in England in the Palladian style’ (and today, like Cowick and Beningbrough, Grade I listed). Baldersby would be the principal seat of the Dawnays for the next three decades.
Here, ‘Butterfield built an estate village for Lord Downe, [showing] his range along the full scale of architectural propriety, from the dignity of the country church to cottages of distinguished simplicity’.9 More Butterfield churches arose (including All Saints’ in Wykeham village), the 7th viscount apparently fulfilling a condition of marriage imposed by his bishop father-in-law.
1854 also saw the purchase of West Heslerton Hall, a 21-bedroom mansion within a 2,000-acre estate encompassing another entire village, less than ten miles from Wykeham Abbey. (In 2012, following death of the ‘eccentric spinster’ Eve Dawnay, great-granddaughter of the 7th viscount, this property was finally sold lock, stock and barrel, assorted descendants benefiting to the tune of some £20 million).
Three years before his nephew’s spending spree, unmarried Marmaduke Langley (left) passed away, bequeathing Wykeham – to which he had added a Doric loggia on the south front (below) among other modifications – to his great-nephew, Viscount Downe’s seven-year-old young son, Hugh.
Now finding themselves the owners of an unwieldy amount of Yorkshire real estate, in 1854 the Wykeham Abbey estate was momentarily advertised ‘to be sold by auction as one lot – house, gardens, estate, plus land in East Riding: total extent 13,420 acres’.10 For whatever reason no sale took place, and secondary Wykeham Abbey would now be ‘left alone for half a century’.
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If his father’s era had been one of remarkable expansion, that of the 8th Viscount Downe would be mostly defined by disposals and contraction. Hugh Dawnay came of age in 1865, beginning nearly sixty years as squire. Four years in, the ancestral Cowick Hall estate was now sold (for £126,000), ‘the pictures and furniture being removed to Baldersby Park’.4 And Baldersby itself would be disposed of in 1900 on the death of his mother the dowager viscountess, along with her landholdings well in excess of 20,000 acres.
The sale of Beningbrough Hall (which had descended via Payan Dawnay, younger son of the clerical 6th viscount, and is today owned by the National Trust) came in 1916, while the estate at Sessay, acquired through the marriage of Sir Guy Dawnay (d.1552), would be sold two years later. But despite all of these disposals Wykeham Abbey would still languish in relative disfavour, the 8th Viscount Downe choosing instead to take this thoroughly Yorkshire family into new territory, buying the 5,000-acre Dingley Hall estate in Northamptonshire for £175,000 in 1883. Dingley (right) would remain the principal family seat until (soldier/diplomat) Hugh Dawnay’s death in 1924. But in the first years of the last century, prompted by the impending marriage of his son and heir, John…
… Wykeham finally became the focus of some serious attention, Dawnay setting relatively obscure Banbury architect Walter Mills loose upon the dormant pile – with mixed results. ‘Externally, Mills was responsible for the cramped three-storey two-bay extensions to the central block, [and] the porch that tried to make sense of the lack of a central bay.’3

Country Life3
Within, much of the existing interiors were now swept away. ‘The space created out of the entrance hall and central range of the old house, stretching round in a forest of columns to the dining room, is masterly, with an almost Pompeian feel about it. To one side of this [Mills positioned] the main staircase rising up through the whole body of the house.’

see: Johanne Spittle
The dining room now occupied one of two single-storey wings on the south front and features a vaulted ceiling of fine plasterwork, ‘although the chimneypiece (←) rather spoils the 18th-century effect’.3 Mills would also be responsible for Wykeham’s handsome East Lodge [see].
Counterbalancing the depletion of Dawnay country houses, John’s 1902 marriage to Dorothy, only daughter of Sir Walter Ffolkes, 3rd Bt., in due course brought that family’s Hillington Hall estate in Norfolk to the Dawnays. Hillington has descended to a grandson of the 9th Viscount Downe, who succeeded after his father’s death in 1924 whereupon Dingley Hall was sold, choice items of Georgian furniture now removed to Wykeham Abbey. These would be complemented by the ‘high quality’ acquisitions of his son, Richard, after he inherited in 1931.11 Adding to the ‘fine, unusually complete collection of family portraits’5 that now adorned Wykeham, the connoisseur 10th Viscount Downe also assembled ‘the largest and finest collection of Rembrandt prints in Great Britain’.12

The Times 27 Nov 1970

The Field14
The Rembrandts were in turn sold a few years after their collector’s death in 1965, son and heir John now pursuing his own multifarious interests. A self-taught electronics entrepreneur, the 11th Viscount Downe (right) ‘maintained a private laboratory at Wykeham Abbey; he also loved Aston Martins, steam railways and flew his own helicopters’. 13 Yet despite sowing many of the seeds of diversification at Wykeham, all the while the estate retained an outwardly traditional face into the 21st century. ‘95% of Wykeham and Ruston villages remain in estate hands, [this] continuity of ownership reflected in their visually restrained character, with timber elements painted the Dawnay Estate colours of buttermilk and brown.’15
Still one of the largest landowners in Yorkshire, 2,500 of the acres surrounding Wykeham Abbey are farmed in-hand with the other half of the Dawnay Estate – more than 10,000 acres of let farmland and grouse moors – some 35 miles north-west at Danby Castle. And while the partial ruin itself now has a contemporary function as a scenic wedding venue…
… the Castle continues to host regular sessions of the Danby Court Leet, which has exercised jurisdiction over rural affairs in the fifty-square-mile manor since medieval times. The offices of bailiff and steward remain in the gift of the present 12th Viscount Downe who, ironically, continues to honour that perpetual penalty handed down by another ancient court system more than four centuries ago…
[Dawnay Estates][Archives: Dawnay | Hutchinson/Langley][Grade II* listing]