Emancipation and renewal

Built between 1758 and 1764, this Georgian house was brilliantly reinvented in the 1960s. It also possesses an opulent chapel, a triumphalist product of Catholic Emancipation.

- John Goodall reports

On January 5, 1758, two carpenters, Richard Bainton and James Cade, were paid $16 18s for pulling down the Old Hall of Everingham. The owner of the property, William Haggerston Constable, was soon to be married and this demolition cleared the site for a completely new family home for himself and his bride.

A sketch of the old house made in the 1720s by Samuel Buck suggests a building of medieval origin adapted and regularised during the course of the 17th century. That complex evolution reflected both the deep history of the building and the tangled circumstances of the recusant Constable family, in whose hands it had descended since the late Middle Ages.

Everingham was reputedly the site of a convent founded in the 7th century by a Wessex noblewoman and saint, Everilda, at the invitation of Bishop Wilfrid. It is first securely documented, however, in the 10th century and the Domesday Survey in 1086 describes it as a possession of the Archbishops of York and tenanted by a knightly family that later assumed the toponym of Everingham. The manor then passed by marriage in 1494 to the Constables of Flamborough, who as both Catholics and Royalists were briefly deprived of their estates by Parliament in the 1650s. Their persecution continued thereafter and, in the early 18th century, Sir Marmaduke Constable, 4th Baronet, encouraged by a long-term injury from a hunting accident, spent his life in self-imposed exile.