The building of Quenby Hall, Leicestershire - a reassessment.

Abstract

Quenby Hall, in Hungarton parish, eight miles north-east of Leicester, is a Jacobean H-plan house standing in parkland on a prominent hill-top site. The presence in east Leicestershire of an early seventeenth-century manor house of elaborate sophistication, but built by a relatively obscure family, raises a series of questions about the siring, architectural style, building process and social context of elite houses in early modern England. This paper presents new architectural evidence for the building of Quenby and clarifies the history of the house. It demonstrates that the house is the result of a single and attenuated building sequence, and that despite suggestions of an earlier house on the site that there is no evidence for this. The paucity of documentary evidence and vague dating of Quenby has muted the architectural and historical significance of the house. By reassessing the building and social history of Quenby here, we hope that the significance of the house will now be recognised.