The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family. Christopher Sykes Simon

the death of his uncle in 1748, to substantial estates on the East Yorkshire Wolds, an area of undulating chalky hills, not unlike the Sussex Downs, that run from east of York nearly all the way to the North Sea. His uncle, Mark Kirkby, had been the richest and most important merchant in Hull. He had used part of the great fortune he had amassed to buy Sledmere and the surrounding estates, and went to live in the Tudor manor house which then stood there and was used mostly as a hunting lodge. He loved it, and the memory of him still survived in my Grandfather’s time.

      Sometime in the middle of October, 1748, a year in which the first excavations were made at Pompeii, Samuel Richardson published Clarissa, and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the War of the Austrian Succession, Richard set out on a journey to look at his uncle’s land. Leaving his house in Hull, he rode north, first to the nearby market town of Beverley, made prosperous during the days of the medieval cloth trade and dominated by its cathedral-size Minster, then followed the course of the River Hull through flat wetlands to Great Driffield. Here he began a slow laborious climb uphill, passing the tower of St Michael’s Church at Garton, pushing his horse on until he reached the summit of Driffield Wold. This is where the Kirkby land began, thirty miles north-east of Hull.

      The Yorkshire Wolds were then a Godforsaken place, being little more than a tract of barren wasteland, much of it one vast open field destitute of hedges and ditches, with stones here and there to mark where one property ended and another began. There were no roads as such, only grass tracks, most goods being carried to market on the backs of horses rather than by cart. Though the hills had once been covered with woodland, these had been cleared by the end of the eleventh century, leaving scarcely any trees, and thin and stony soil. There were the occasional scrappy fields of oats or barley and whatever grassland was not in use for grazing sheep was fenced off into rabbit warrens. Less than a century before, wolves had roamed the area freely. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1720, described it as being ‘very thin of towns, and consequently of people’,¹ most of the villages having been depopulated in the sixteenth century to make way for sheep. It cannot have appeared to Richard as the most congenial of environments.

      After a few miles’ ride across the top, from where, if the day was a clear one, he would have caught a glimpse of the North Sea glinting to the east, where the source of his wealth, a fleet of ships, plied their trade out of Hull with the Baltic, he came to a dip in the land. Pausing to give his horse a rest, he looked down upon what he had come to see. The village of Sledmere, which lay at the heart of the Kirkby estate, stood in the bottom of the valley straddling a Roman road, which ran from York in the west to Bridlington on the east coast. It had a church and a large mere, a pond used for the common watering of livestock and from which the village got its name, translating literally as ‘pool in the valley’. Little had changed there since 1572 when it was described as consisting of ‘thirty messuages, ten cottages, ten tofts, five dovecots, forty gardens, forty orchards, 1,000 acres of land, 100 acres of meadow, 1,000 acres of pasture, forty acres of wood, 100 acres of heath and furze and … Free Warren.’² According to Nicholas Manners, a Methodist missionary who had been born there in 1732, its inhabitants were ‘extremely ignorant of religion, wild and wicked’.³ As Richard surveyed the scene below him, his eyes were drawn to a building which stood to the north-west of the village, on rising ground overlooking the mere. This was ‘the manor house of Sledmer upon the Woulds’,⁴ the home of his recently deceased uncle.

      As Richard rode his horse slowly down the hill, memories of his Uncle Mark came flooding back. Daniel Defoe had written of ‘that glorious Head of Commerce, called the Merchant’, and in Hull, they had called Mark Kirkby ‘the Merchant Prince’, for at a time when trade with the Baltic was booming and merchant families were amassing great fortunes, he was the richest of them all. He had bought the land at Sledmere in order to pursue his favourite sport of hunting, and during the season would move into the manor house where he liked to surround himself with his sporting cronies. He was known to be fond of the bottle, a trait which he shared in common with all the squires of the day, and Richard smiled as he recalled the agreement that his uncle had once made with his Coachman, that they should never get drunk the same evening. Instead each should have the privilege on alternate nights. It had not been a success, for on the very first occasion that it had fallen to the Coachman’s turn to be sober and Uncle Mark was indulging himself without restraint at some friend’s house, early in the evening his enjoyment had been disturbed by the entry of his Coachman into the room crying ‘Tak care o’yesell Master, I’se going fast.’⁵

      Richard also remembered an occasion when he had attended a supper given by his uncle for all his tenants and other dependants, at which, owing to the bottle having circulated the table one too many times, the general tenor of the evening had deteriorated and the mirth had become too uproarious. At this point, ‘Old Mark Kirkby’, as he was known in the neighbourhood, had risen somewhat unsteadily to his feet, his florid face beneath its flowing periwig contrasting vividly with his favourite blue velvet coat, and loudly rapped the table crying ‘Mark Kirkby is at home!’ It was evident that to all those gathered round the table this was a well-known signal at which all merriment was to be hushed and the proper decorum restored. However much of a good fellow the Merchant Prince may have been, he did not like his guests to forget their place.

      Like Kirkby, the Sykeses were successful merchants. Originally yeoman farmers, they had come from a place called Sykes Dyke, near Carlisle. One of their descendants, William Sykes, had left Cumberland in about 1550 and settled in Leeds where he had set up as a clothier. He could not have timed his arrival better. The town, which is conveniently situated on the borders of the industrial West Riding and the predominantly agricultural North-East, was on the move. The textile industry was expanding rapidly, spreading wealth through the valleys and uplands west and south of the town. Cloth woven in the outlying villages was brought into Leeds to undergo all the various finishing processes and was then marketed by local merchants whose fortunes snowballed. As industry developed the population doubled and by the middle of the seventeenth century Leeds was the epicentre of woollen manufacture. Clothiers and merchants thronged the huge cloth market held on and around Leeds bridge. The town’s inhabitants, wrote Macaulay, ‘boasted loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the immense sales of cloth which took place in the open air on the Bridge. Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds had been paid down in the course of one busy market day.’⁶ Within two generations the family had accumulated so much money that William’s grandson, Richard, who had risen to being Alderman of Leeds and was the first ‘private gentleman’ in the city to own a carriage,⁷ was able to leave each of his three daughters the sum of £10,000, a staggering sum for those days, as well as vast estates to his five sons.⁸

      While this branch of the family continued to prosper in Leeds, one of Richard’s grandchildren, Daniel, set up in business as a merchant in Hull, seeing the great opportunities that were opening up in the city from its burgeoning trade with the Baltic. Hull, whose port arose around the confluence of the Rivers Hull and Humber, had risen to greatness in medieval times when her proximity to the vast sheep runs of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire had stood her in good stead in the important wool trade. When cloth eventually replaced wool as the major English export, her fortunes had temporarily waned, the London merchants having a virtual monopoly in everything except raw wool, but they had risen rapidly again in the latter half of the seventeenth century with the opening up of direct trade to the Baltic. ‘There is more business done in Hull’, Daniel Defoe had observed in 1724, ‘than in any town of its bigness in Europe … They drive a great trade here to Norway, and to the Baltick, and an important trade to Dantzick, Riga, Narva and Petersburgh; from whence they make large returns in iron, copper, flax, canvas, pot-ashes, Muscovy Linnen and yarn, and other things; all which they get vent for in the country to an exceeding quantity.’⁹ By the time of his death in 1697, Daniel Sykes’s firm