History of SLOLEY HALL NORFOLK

A brief history of the Estate (extract from Sloley Estate Heritage Landscape Plan)

In the Middle Ages, northeast Norfolk was an open, un-enclosed landscape of heaths, commons, and arable open fields with few hedges or woods. This situation began to change in the Post-Medieval period when open fields began to be enclosed in a slow, gradual, piecemeal process, which continued over several centuries. By the early nineteenth century, this process had resulted in the removal of most of the open fields but left the commons untouched.

The commons and heaths were gradually enclosed as a result of Napoleonic wars, some of these areas lapsed into woodland. Woods and clumps were also established around the landscape parks which were laid out in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By this time the area was also generously endowed with hedgerow trees.

The gradual enclosure of the region’s open fields did not involve a change in land use, the land had predominantly been arable since the Middle Ages and this has remained true throughout the post-medieval centuries. Grassland was largely restricted to parks and damper soils.

The development of the landscape at Sloley Hall cannot be understood in isolation from the development of the Slolely Hall Estate itself, which was assembled piecemeal by a number of different individuals. It is probably unnecessary to take the history back before the early eighteenth century when Thomas Mack began to acquire property here and in the adjacent parish of Scottow. Thomas was admitted to a messuage in Sloley in 1712. John Mack, Thomas’s son, inherited in 1769 and continued to add land and property to the estate.

In 1789 the Sloley properties passed to John Mack’s daughter, Anne who married the Rev. Benjamin Cubitt Rector of Sloley. Cubitt built the new Hall in 1815 and laid out the diminutive park to accompany it. The Hall and park were laid out on a virgin site, which had previously been in arable production. The Hall was designed by the Rev. James Gunn an amateur architect whom local gentry’s families in the district had financed to go on a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe.

Benjamin Cubitt came from Honing and his father used the services of H. Repton to lay out the park at Honing. The siting of Sloley Hall, its woods, and park bear all the hallmarks of a Repton-inspired landscape.

Reginald Janes Neville White (changed to Neville in 1885) was born in 1863. He was the son of James White and Evelyn Stogdon and the eldest of five siblings. The only other male heir was Lionel Neville who died of wounds in 1914. Reginald was married twice; firstly in 1890 to Ida Henderson b1862, died 1913. They had three children Mary Nevile b1891 who subsequently had four children all female. Beatrice Neville b1894, who had three children; two boys and one girl, and James E H Neville (my great grandfather) b1897, died 1982. He was the youngest child and had two children Rosalind (my grandmother), and Janey.

James Neville married Violet Baines b1885 in 1920, she died in 1972. They had three children, two by a previous marriage to Jock Hunter (died of wounds in 1918) - Michael Hunter b 1886 (no children), Rosemary Hunter (no children), and then their own son Richard Neville b1921 who died in 1994.

In Reginald James Neville’s will in 1950, he left the Sloley Estate and all the named cottages in Sloley and Frankfort to James E H Neville (my great grandfather), stocks and shares in a lifetime trust were left to Michael and Rosemary (to be returned to the owner of Sloley Hall on the death of the last child). Richard Neville was left Sloley Hall and all of its contents as well as all other stocks and shares.

My grandmother Rosalind married Philip Gorton, they have three children, Mark Phillip Gorton, Elizabeth Hill, Colin Gorton, and my father Simon Gorton who is their eldest child.

Following discussions between Richard Neville and my father Simon Gorton, Richard left Sloley Hall to my father, I now look after the hall and its grounds with my girlfriend Jodie and we look forward to welcoming you to our wonderful home.

The Sloley Estate is a well-preserved example of a piece of the countryside that has remained unaffected by the agricultural intensifications of the 1950s and 1960s, its dense mesh of hedges, the distinctive combination of straight and sinuous boundaries, the numerous tall oaks, the isolated church, thatched barns, the small country house set in its park together constitute an ensemble which contrasts sharply with the degraded countryside around.