Great Fulford

My family have lived here since ‘time Immemorial’ which is a legal term and means you have held your land since before the coronation of Richard I in 1189. We are in fact probably a descendant of one Modbert who owned the manor in 1086.

We are lucky as the house is sited on a hill looking south over the lake and rolling parkland. Behind the house are numerous springs which enabled our ancestors to dig wells and run pipes from them into the kitchen using gravity to give them water at the turn of a medieval tap.

Over the course of 13th,14th and 15th centuries we grew richer and our estates expanded through the simple expedient of marrying a succession heiresses. The medieval Great Hall is still the core of the house and although nothing now earlier than 1520 is visible, when my grandfather restored it in 1910 he discovered under the plaster all the evidence of its early origins. As I say to Americans “It is like a Hollywood actress the bones are ancient but the skin has changed.”

By 1400 the family owned land scattered over Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. Great Fulford was then a simple courtyard house with the Great Hall entered via a courtyard which itself was entered into through a grand red sandstone gate erected from dendrochronological evidence about 1420.

The then owner was Sir Baldwin, the great hero of the family. He fought in the Hundred Years War and in 1451 he went on his travels to the east where ” he killed and enormous Saracen for bulk and bigness an unequal match for the honour and liberty of a royal lady besieged in a castle.” He was knighted at the Holy Sepulcher and returned to take part in the last campaign of the Hundred Years War. He returned a hero to England as, in October of that year, he was commander of the last English garrison to surrender to the French after Sir Roger Camoys had pusillanimously surrendered Bordeaux.

He returned to fight for Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses and, after the disastrous defeat at Towton, he was captured by one Staplehill at Dartmouth, taken to Bristol and given a traitors death, being hung drawn and quartered. The worm Staplehill now received most of Sir Baldwin’s estates as his reward including Great Fulford where he ensconced himself and his family.

Sir Baldwin’s son, Sir Thomas was having none of this. In 1465 Staplehill whined to the king that Sir Thomas had – with an armed body of men, broken into ‘his house at Fulford’ sore beat and wounded his servants and threatened his wife telling her ‘if he had there been founded no gold would have redeemed him

Sir Thomas survived the Wars of the Roses and ended up on the winning side at Bosworth. he was now the owner of one of the great estates in the west country and we as a family, were at or peak. It was his grandson Sir John who built most of the house you see today. Building a brand new courtyard to the east of the Great Hall complete with a Great Parlour and a Great Chamber (now the Ballroom). His son put on another floor and placed a swanky coat of arms over the gateway, advertising to all that the Fulford’s where a genuine old family and not a new one like those Tudor nouveaux riche, Thynnes, Cecils and Cavendishes and the like(Tudor gentry where terrific snobs) .

Come the Civil War we were ‘for the King’ thank God -what shame it would be to be descended from a woke roundhead! The house was besieged for ten days in 1642 and taken and sacked, then re taken by the royalists, garrisoned by them and retaken once more in 1646 by Colonel Okey’s dragoons. Colonel Okey lived on to the Restoration when he suffered his just deserts as a regicide and was hung, drawn and quartered.

On the Restoration the king gave to my aged ancestor, Sir Francis (he was over eighty) a marvelous full length baroque portrait of his martyred father as some recompense for the blood (his eldest son, Colonel Thomas was killed) and money spilled and spent in his cause.

In 1690 Sir Francis’s grandson began the restoration of the house. He created a series of ‘Great rooms’ within the Tudor walls of the north side of the courtyard. An atrium rising the full height of the house was ruthlessly carved out of a number of Tudor rooms and led via a magnificent staircase to a new Great Drawing room designed to show off the portrait of king Charles I. Sadly Colonel Francis allowed his creative imagination to run away and he took no account of the structural integrity of the house so just over a hundred years later the ceiling and north wall of the Great staircase collapsed killing a workman and for the next hundred years all the Great Rooms were shut and called ‘the Ruin.’

The family fortunes had suffered badly in the 18th century due to not one, but two idiots. The result was that nearly all the outlying properties were sold to pay debts. John Fulford though he did, like his father overspend, at least left behind the legacy of the lake which he created by damming up the valley and which contributes enormously to the beauty of the house and park, so I forgive him much.

He was succeeded by his nephew, Colonel Baldwin, who was a model squire. a great agriculturalist, a keen forester and a builder of model cottages. A paragon. He employed James Wyatt to ‘romanticize the house which he did by removing the Tudor gables and replacing them with battlements and throwing out bays on the corners. Internally he created a series of reception rooms in the ‘gothick’ taste.
The Colonel was succeeded by his son, another Baldwin. Sadly he suffered from ‘financial incontinence’ to such an extent that in 1863 he fled the country leaving behind £60,000 ( £6.0 million plus) worth of debts. Somehow his brother and others managed to keep the house and estate afloat. The house was let, the woods felled, the silver sold and it was agreed that his brother’s son, Francis would be his heir.

Thirty years went past before the family once again made Fulford their home.

In 1910 My grandfather, Francis Algernon, began his great dream of restoring the ‘Great Rooms’. He completed the Great Hall and the staircase before the war intervened, dying a few years after.

It was left to my father returning from the war in 1948 and marrying my mother, to take this project further.
They restored the Great Parlour and in 1960, when advised that if they did not do something the whole north wall of the courtyard would collapse, set about carrying out the necessary structural work with no help from a grant which had been refused. The then Lord Euston, later Duke of Grafton (was then in charge of approving such grants) came down to visit and turned my father down! Years later my mother sat next to him at a dinner and taxed him with his meanness and he said “Yes I have always have felt a bit guilty about that.” To which my mother responded; “I should think so too.”

The result was my parents could only afford to do a rudimentary job on the interior of the Ballroom. In 2010 though I discovered that probably the finest exponent of art of decorative plasterwork, Geoffrey Preston, lived within a few miles of me. At the time I was about to install a ‘biomass boiler’ to heat the house. I did not think twice. I consigned the boiler to the scrap heap and commissioned Geoffrey to do the ceiling which is a triumph. whenever I am feeling cold I go to look at it and congratulate myself on my good sense.

In 2020 we finally completed the restoration of all Colonel Francis’s Great Rooms. when we re-panelled the Ante Room and re- glazed the Full length windows which had been blocked up for two hundred years.

I have one other task to do. Originally the Great Staircase was crowned with a marvelous decorated plaster ceiling which my grandfather did not have the funds to replicate when he restored it. I better though get on with it as neither Geoffrey or me are getting any younger.