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Summary

Godolphin Hall was the seat of the Godolphin family who rose in power during Tudor and Stuart times.

Protected Status

• Listed Building (I) 65746: GODOLPHIN HOUSE

Other References/Statuses

• National Monuments Record: SW 63 SW 3
• National Record of the Historic Environment to Historic Environment Records data transfer
• National Record of the Historic Environment: 425981
• OS No. (OS Quarter-sheet and OS No.): SW63SW 3
• Primary Record No. (1985-2009): 29453.10
• SMR No. (OS Quarter-sheet and SMR No.): SW63SW 6

Monument Type(s):

• HOUSE (Medieval - 1066 AD to 1539 AD)
• HOUSE (Post Medieval - 1540 AD to 1900 AD)

Full description

Godolphin Hall is marked in antiquity script on current OS Maps (b16). The house was the seat of the Godolphin family who rose in power during Tudor and Stuart times (b3-b6). This house is Grade I listed and has features dated to the late C15 and late C17, renovated in the C20. It was originally a double courtyard house of which one courtyard remains, with the original intercourt wing now a skeleton wall. The north side of the court was closed by a colonnaded wing in the C17 (b12). It is described by the OS surveyor as an outstanding house which retains many of its original features (h1).

The Manor of the Godolghans was founded by Alexander at the very end of the C13. He built up a major estate based on minerals, chiefly tin, but also copper. The range of granite hills, Godolphin, Tregonning and Tresowes, gave it its identity, even from a distance. Tregonning Hill was a source of good building stones and the Godolghan workshops used these, providing towers, porches, arcades and tracery windows for the majority of churches in western Cornwall, as well as for their own house.

Just as the development of the house and its surroundings resulted from the family’s wealth due to tin, so its reduction resulted from a decline in the price of tin. By 1640, Godolphin was the largest house in Cornwall, but in 1800 the dilapidated southern courtyards were pulled down.

The foundation of the new manor was marked by a deliberately designed landscape comprising the Hayle River valley bottom, the domain farm and lanes, the castle itself in its precinct and the deer park, the latter of 480 acres running over Godolphin Hill. Much of the designed landscape survives, but nothing of the castle above ground, apart from a few fragments of window tracery. In 1386 a licence was granted to say Mass in the Chapel of the Blessed St Mary at Godolghan. This may well mark the construction of a purpose-built domestic chapel standing clear of what is likely to have been rather a cramped old castle.

Documentary and physical evidence confirms the date of c 1475 for the house built de novo by John Godolghan to replace the castle. Its site and angle in relationship to the castle set-up were governed by the restrictions of the site, by access and probably by the wish to retain the phase 1 chapel sanctuary.
The house was large and low, built around two courtyards divided by the great hall. Excellent high end accommodation was provided; a large great chamber and withdrawing chamber can still be seen over the undercrofts of the west range.

On the east side of the first court the principal guest lodging consisted of a hall, great chamber, parlour and withdrawing or bedchamber, all of which still exist. The vanished north range of must have been made up of two more similar lodgings of decreasing quality. Thus John Godolghan was excellently provided to entertain up to his own degree; for visitors above that, he had to decamp from the west range.

Of this date, the great hall porch archway (the ancestral portal of Godolphin, deliberately preserved by later generations) with its characteristic panelled jambs survived in situ. On the round lawn of the fore court the unusual pillar piscina from the chapel can also be seen.

The visit of John Leland in 1537 coincided with major and ambitious changes by Sir William Godolphin I to his grandfather’s house. The family were becoming increasingly important in Cornwall and the Godolphins figured at Court.

Sir William changed the entrance from the west face (where the later stable range joins the building) to the north, a move which demonstrated the family’s shift of concerns from West Cornwall to wider horizons.
Grand and useful guests from up-country were now to be impressed by a straight and graded north approach and a symmetrical sequence of gates and towers (six of them) around a new fore court and entrance front fashionably evoking ideas of castles. But more than that, these major changes extended to the type of accommodation Godolphin provided. Sir William added to the original first floor lodging in the west range to form a fine, dedicated state lodging. At the same time, the lodging in the east range was up-graded for the family themselves. Its entrance was contrived through the east flank of the great hall porch (the front door of the house) by construction of a connecting passage. The carved ceiling, linen fold panelling and big windows for armorial glass, which can still be seen in the dining room, celebrate its re-use as the family’s hall.

Such major, even extravagant, changes must relate to a considerable increase in the family’s wealth, probably the discovery of very rich loads of tin in the family’s mine, the romantically-named Great Work (on the National Trust estate).

On inheriting, Sir Francis Godolphin I commenced by softening and embellishing the stern north front (1570-1610). The classicising courtyard gate is of part of these works intended to be in the Roman Doric order. It gave the house a frontispiece, behind and over which a loggia and a gallery ran. The gallery, connecting the inner end of the state apartment with the inner end of his own apartment, provided the perfect place for private conversation with influential guests.

There is some documentary evidence for a second, longer gallery connecting the parlour of the high end accommodation to a garden range overlooking Elizabethan works in the garden on the east (now the side garden).

Later, in the mid 1590s, Francis built the stables, extending west of the house. (The back wall is the north wall of a privy garden of 1500, called the King’s garden). The three-part symmetry of its front is extraordinary and probably due to Robert Adams or Simon Basil, with whom Sir Francis worked on Star Castle, the fort on St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly in the 1590s. Francis also improved the kitchen and service part of the house.

It is hard to know where the work of Sir Francis gave way to that of his son Sir William III. Perhaps the father was responsible for rebuilding the great hall, widening it into the principal courtyard and giving it a curious elevation with a tall two-light window between two four-light windows. The design is distinctive and unconventional; perhaps it derives from the same source as the stables. The continuation of the hall’s high rendered plinth around the west range shows that improvements were intended here at the same time. However, the fenestration and details of the changes here seem quite distinct, possibly deriving from the more advanced ideas of Sir William III who had been educated at Padua University in the early 1590s. The stone used for the dressings of both this and the hall , as well as the stables is griesen, an extremely hard, altered granite which occurred on Godolphin land.

The reworking of the west range included the Barnstaple plasterwork frieze of the withdrawing room as well as the paired bays and fireplace of the state great chamber (the King’s room), an arrangement apparently unique to this room. The King’s room contains overmantle from the great hall, placed on the paired, attached columns of the hall screen in 1800 when it was moved here. This fine object, together with other existing fragments, shows the sophisticated mannerism of the great hall interior of about 1610. It is probably the work of Flemish craftsmen from a workshop in Southwark and it celebrates the marriage of Sir William with Thomasin, the last of the Sidneys of Wighton in Norfolk, an important connection for the Godolphins.

Sir Francis Godolphin III inherited, after a long period of stewardship by his uncle, at Christmas in 1626. He must have started remaking Godolphin almost immediately on a new plan around a square courtyard. It was to have four well-appointed apartments, with their bedchambers in the corners and lodge reception, or dining rooms, linking them at the middle of each side. The idea was very Italian and appropriate to its young builder who, together with his celebrated poet brother Sidney, embraced the humanist and philosophical outlook of Lucius Carey’s Great Tew circle. If it had been completed - and if there were such a house-type - it would a symposium or convivium, because it is designed to promote congenial company. Godolphin was the most Westerly great house in the land.

Francis managed to rework the west range again, making a new roof structure to support the fashionable canopied ceiling of the King’s room, then he built the north range, utilising the Tudor towers at the ends and the curtain wall between them. It was daring and very advanced, balancing the first floor on two loggias back-to-back, an idea unique in this country. The roof (a flat lead one with finials on the hipped ends) was on and the wall plaster dry by 1634, a date which makes the classicism of its conception and planning remarkable; its contemporaries are Covent Garden, the Queen’s House, Wilton (Pembroke was a relative) and Raynham (which was 11 miles on the London side of brother Sidney’s Norfolk estate).

On the east side are the remains of toothings for construction of a proposed garden range, which would have entailed pulling down the existing late medieval work, (containing the dining room). The survival of his uncle and the build-up to the Civil War put a stop to the work at this point. Undoubtedly the house was intended to open onto a new garden set out perpendicular to it, but this and the other civilised hopes of the Godolphins were removed, together with their money, by the misfortunes of the war. Francis and Dorothy (a Berkley) made a satisfying life here all the same, and they had 16 children among them Sidney, the first Earl, who became Lord Treasurer to Queen Anne, and had a son Francis, the second Earl who married Henrietta, daughter of the first Duke of Marlborough (pers comm John Schofield).

--------------------------------
Site history:
1: 1970. FLETCHER,MJ/OS
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Untitled Source (Unspecified Type). SCO30749.

Various, 1973, Report of the Summer Meeting of the Royal Archaeological Institute at Truro in 1973, 262-264 (Article in Journal). SCO30748.

Cooper, N & Fletcher, M, 1995, Godolphin and its gardens (Report). SCO30750.

Keystone Historic Buildings Consultants, 2009, Godolphin Farm Buildings Piggery ( Draft Report) (Report). SCO25614.

Allan, J & Hughes, M & Cramp, C, 2009-10, Pottery and tiles from Godolphin (Article in Serial). SCO25283.

<1> Norden, J, 1728, Speculi Britanniae Pars, 33 (Bibliographic reference). SCO4001.

<2> UNKNOWN, 18--, W Antiquary, VOL III, 209 (Unedited Source). SCO5721.

<3> Gilbert, CS, 1820, An Historical and Topographical Survey of the County of Cornwall, II, 758-759 (Bibliographic reference). SCO3360.

<4> Hitchins, F & Drew, S (Eds), 1824, The History of Cornwall, VOL 2, 113 (Bibliographic reference). SCO3595.

<5> Penaluna, W, 1838, An Historical Survey of the County of Cornwall, I, 80-81 (Bibliographic reference). SCO4104.

<6> Polsue, J (Editor), 1867-72, Lake's Parochial History of Cornwall, VOL 1, 137-138 (Bibliographic reference). SCO4139.

<7> UNKNOWN, 1888, UNKNOWN TITLE, VOL IX, 465-470 (Unedited Source). SCO6478.

<8> UNKNOWN, 1898, UNKNOWN TITLE, VOL XII, 407-422 (Unedited Source). SCO6592.

<9> Henderson, C, 1914, Notebooks of Parochial Antiquities, VOL I, 193-196 (Unpublished document). SCO3503.

<10> Henderson, C, 1955-60, Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the 109 parishes of West Cornwall & Ecclesiastical History of the 4 Western Hundreds, (NS) 35-36 (Article in Journal). SCO3499.

<11> Leland, 1967, Early Tours in Devon and Cornwall, 29-30 (Bibliographic reference). SCO3860.

<12> DOE, Listed Building Description (original DOE), APRIL 1969, 3-4 (Bibliographic reference). SCO5173.

<13> Pevsner, N, 1951, The Buildings of England: Cornwall, 60 (Bibliographic reference). SCO4126.

<14> UNKNOWN, 1973, PROGRAMME OF SUMMER MEETING AT TRURO (Unedited Source). SCO8212.

<15> UNKNOWN, 1973, UNKNOWN TITLE, VOL VIII, 221-222 (Unedited Source). SCO8217.

<16> Ordnance Survey, 1970s, 1:10,000 OS Map (Cartographic materials). SCO4045.

Sources / Further Reading

Associated Finds: none recorded

Associated Events

• ECO2755 - Godolphin House, Cornwall
• ECO3342 - Godolphin House, drains and floors
• ECO3693 - Pottery and tiles from Godolphin
• ECO3896 - Godolphin Farm Buildings Piggery (Draft Report)
• ECO2886 - Godolphin, Breage, Cornwall (Ref: K/757b)
• ECO3092 - Godolphin Breage Cornwall (Ref: K/757)
• ECO2639 - Godolphin
• ECO2730 - Godolphin, December 1999 & Services WB 2002

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