Blickling Hall

• 1. Introduction

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  Blickling Hall sits in a loop of the River Bure in Norfolk, England, where the flat countryside offers almost nowhere to hide. Yet for five centuries this Jacobean mansion has quietly accumulated one of the most layered histories of any house in Britain. It sheltered a family whose daughter would become queen. It was built by a Lord Chief Justice who never lived to see it finished. It fed wartime pilots from its dining rooms. And in its library, an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 volumes wait on shelves stretching 146 linear feet. How did a single estate in rural Norfolk become the keeper of so many different stories? The answer begins not with the house that stands today, but with the one that preceded it.

• 2. The Boleyn Years

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  Between 1499 and 1505, Blickling was home to Thomas Boleyn and his wife Elizabeth. Thomas would later become Earl of Wiltshire, but in those years he was raising a family in the old Tudor house that still stood on the site. Historians including Eric Ives have argued that all three of their surviving children were likely born at Blickling: Mary around 1499, George around 1504, and Anne around 1501. A statue and portrait at the estate carry the Latin inscription "Anna Bolena hic nata 1507" - which translates as "Anne Boleyn born here 1507" - though that date conflicts with other historical evidence. Before the Boleyns arrived, the property had been held by Sir John Fastolf of Caister in Norfolk, who lived from around 1380 to 1459 and made his fortune in the Hundred Years' War. His coat of arms is still displayed at Blickling today, a quiet reminder of the estate's depth of memory.

• 3. Building the New House

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  Sir Henry Hobart, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and 1st Baronet, bought Blickling from Lady Agnes Clere in 1616. He chose Robert Lyminge as his architect - the same man who designed Hatfield House - and set about replacing the old Boleyn property with something grander. Hobart had married Dorothy, daughter of Sir Robert Bell of Beaupre Hall in Outwell and Upwell, Norfolk. Bell had served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1572 to 1576. The house Sir Henry began was not completed in his own lifetime. His son Sir John Hobart, the 2nd Baronet, married Frances Egerton in 1621 and the couple lived at Blickling for twenty years. It was Sir John who finished what his father had started, though doing so left the family carrying enormous debts. Frances managed to reduce that burden by six thousand pounds, though she had to delay payments to creditors in doing so. John died in 1647, and their daughter Phillipa, the only child to survive, married her cousin Sir John Hobart, the 3rd Baronet.

• 4. Landscape and Gardens

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  Sir Henry Hobart reshaped the grounds after acquiring the estate in 1616, adding ponds, a wilderness and a parterre, and constructing a garden mount - an artificial hill built to give views over the new gardens in an otherwise flat landscape. By 1698 the estate had passed to Sir John Hobart, the 5th Baronet, who was created Earl of Buckinghamshire in 1746. He was responsible for the ha-ha and the Doric Temple and extended the park by buying adjacent land. His son John Hobart, the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, then swept away all traces of formality between 1765 and 1785, replacing them with naturally arranged clumps of trees and a landscape garden. By the 1780s an orangery had been added to overwinter tender citrus trees. After the 2nd Earl died in 1793, his daughter Caroline employed Humphry Repton and his son John Adey Repton to advise on the grounds. John Adey Repton went on to design many features of the garden. Decades later, after disparaging comments appeared in Country Life, the 11th Marquess of Lothian brought in gardener Norah Lindsay to rework the parterre in the early 1930s. Lindsay replaced a jumble of small flower beds with four large square beds planted with herbaceous plants in graduated and harmonious colours, and lined the Temple walk with azaleas. Thirty ornamental pieces supplied by Austin and Seeley of Euston Road, London were installed for Lady Lothian in 1877 and remain scattered across the grounds today.

• 5. War and Inheritance

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  Philip Kerr, the 11th Marquess of Lothian, was the last private owner of Blickling. After his death in December 1940 the estate passed to the National Trust as part of his bequest, under the terms of the Country Houses Scheme. The timing placed Blickling directly into the orbit of World War II. The house was requisitioned and served as the Officers' Mess for nearby RAF Oulton. Officers were housed inside the mansion itself, while RAF servicemen and women were billeted in Nissen huts on the grounds. The adjacent lake was used by personnel to practise dinghy drills during the war. After the fighting ended, the house was returned to the Trust, which let it to tenants until 1960. Restoration work then began, and the house and grounds opened to the public in 1962. In 2019 alone the estate received 225,624 visitors. The National Trust has since established the RAF Oulton Museum on site, which can be visited for no additional entrance fee, honouring the pilots and ground crew who were stationed there.

• 6. The Library Collection

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  Sir Richard Ellys, who lived from 1682 to 1742 and was a cousin of the Hobarts of Blickling, formed the core of the library collection. What he assembled grew into an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 volumes spanning 146 linear feet of shelving. Among the manuscripts associated with the house is the Blickling Homilies, considered one of the earliest surviving examples of English vernacular homiletic writing. Richard Morris edited and translated the homilies in the 19th century and his work is still regarded as definitive. A later edition by Richard J. Kelly was widely criticised by scholars upon publication. A second significant manuscript once held at Blickling is the Blickling or Lothian Psalter, an 8th-century illuminated psalter with Old English glosses, now in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where it is catalogued as MS M.776. John Gandy began the task of cataloguing the entire Blickling collection in 2010. Records are made available as the project progresses through the National Trust website and COPAC, though Gandy did not expect to complete the work for several years.

• 7. Conservation and Innovation

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  Work began in October 2015 to install a heat pump system drawing warmth from the estate's lake. Tubing filled with a plant-based glycol would be placed in the water and the resulting liquid pumped into the house for heating. The National Trust estimated the system would save around 25,000 litres of oil each year and generate cost savings of roughly sixteen thousand pounds. In February 2021 a different kind of conservation challenge came to light. The parasitic wasp species Trichogramma evanescens was being deployed inside the hall to protect artworks threatened by the common clothes moth. Among the pieces at risk was a tapestry from Catherine the Great. Chemicals designed to disrupt the moths' mating behaviour were also being used alongside the wasps. The estate covers 4,777 acres in total, including 500 acres of woodland, 450 acres of parkland and 3,500 acres of farmland. Much of that agricultural land is actively managed by the National Trust to generate income that supports the house, gardens and park. Starting in 2015, Blickling's unused walled garden, covering one and a half acres, began to be restored.