The Building Accounts of Harrold Hall

Summary

The last thirty years of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century saw in England a prodigious amount of new building both in town and country, but there are relatively few building accounts for the houses of this period, and when they do exist the building itself does not always survive. This is so at Harrold where the Hall was demolished in 1961. Before demolition, however, the building was surveyed and a photographic record made, and these together with a small book of accounts now in the County Record Office, Bedford, provide an excellent record of the house and also of the manner of its building in the early years of the 17th century.

The House

Harrold Hall stood immediately to the south-east of the church, between the church and the river. It was a three-storeyed house, E-shaped in plan with its principal front facing south towards the river. It was built of rubble stone with ashlar dressings. It had mullioned and transomed windows, moulded string courses dividing the three storeys, and pretty little finials on the broad gables of the wings. The entrance porch in the centre of the south front rose the full height of the house and, like other Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire houses of the period, was no doubt the most ornamented part of the building. Indeed there is a clear hint of this in the building accounts which provide imported Weldon stone for the porch and also, for the finer details, the workmanship of a Northamptonshire master-mason, Thomas Grumbold.

The porch and the whole of the recessed centre of the south elevation were obliterated in 1816 by the insertion of a large two storey addition between the flanking wings, and previous to this many of the original windows had been replaced in the 18th century by sash windows with moulded architraves. Despite these changes, however, one could, prior to the demolition, still recognise the original building as a medium-sized house, spare of ornament but symmetrical and well-proportioned, the sort of house being built at the turn of the century not by the very rich who preferred more ostentation but by the moderately well off, ambitious for a new house but content with a building traditional in form and detail.