The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Hall house
Hall house
Atherstone Place is a medieval hall-house, now 12 Eastgate, Lincoln. It was formerly the hall of a larger building. It originally dates from the 13thc but includes a reset 12thc doorway, on the ground floor of the front facade, and it was altered in the early 16thc., and a floor inserted and the ground floor completely remodelled in the 17thc. In the 19thc the roof was raised and the W gable rebuilt.
Hall house
Burton Agnes Manor House is a rectangular two storey block and, when seen from the usual S or E approach, it appears of brick like the adjacent Elizabethan Hall to the E. Within this ‘complete disguise’ (Wood 1956, 1), the hall is a largely 12thc building comprising undercroft and first-floor hall. A view from the churchyard, from the W, shows the proximity of the original manor house to its church. Round the back of the building, in a separate out-building, is a 12thc well, with a wooden donkey wheel approximately 20m deep.
The N wall is original masonry, with a blocked entrance doorway at first floor level at the W end. This shows no sculpture on either face but only plain and square components; it would have been reached by an external stair. The large stone chimney breast on the same wall is probably original but perhaps not of our period; also, the series of corbels supporting it featuring convex faces and plain sides were carved later on.
The fabric is mixed and consists of chalk (in the voussoirs of the undercroft vault) and local limestone with brick repairs for the walls. The first floor hall measures 13.6m x 6.9m (Wood 1974, 54-55). Some of its pavement is said to survive. As well as the interior face of the entrance doorway at the W end of the N wall, a similar arch of chalk voussoirs is seen at the E end of the same wall; this is considered to be for a window to light the top end of the hall, but that seems impractical. No other window openings can be identified.
Sculpture decorates the vaulted undercroft - the central supports having lugs, waterleaf capitals and chamfer stops; there is a head corbel behind the door in the SE corner.