En un regard
Le château en bref
Gainsborough Old Hall is one of the best-preserved medieval manor houses in England. It stands in the heart of the town of Gainsborough, in west Lincolnshire, not far from the River Trent. The buildings are arranged around a courtyard: a central great hall with its original timber roof, flanked by two-storey wings, a three-storey lodging range, a brick corner tower to the north-east and a very large brick kitchen.
The manor house was rebuilt from the late 1460s or early 1470s by Thomas Burgh, who was knighted in 1461 and made a baron in 1487, and who had inherited the estate in 1455. Richard III stayed there in 1484, and Henry VIII in 1541, accompanied by Catherine Howard. The London merchant William Hickman bought the estate in 1596, and his family lived there until around 1730. The Hickman circle is associated with sheltering local Separatist communities.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the building had a wide variety of uses: John Wesley preached in the great hall from 1759, the hall became a theatre in 1790, and other parts housed a linen factory, dwellings or workshops. In 1848 a corn exchange, assembly rooms and a literary institute were installed, followed by a Masonic lodge in 1890. From 1949 a Friends of the Old Hall association restored it. Taken into state guardianship in 1969, it is now open to the public and managed by English Heritage.
