Worksop Manor

Worksop Manor is a Grade I listed country house situated in Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, England, within the area of the four contiguous ducal estates historically known as the Dukeries. The present building, constructed in ashlar stone with hipped slate roofs and forming a quadrangle approximately 25 bays wide by 14 bays deep, represents the surviving remnant of what was once one of the most ambitious country house projects ever conceived in England.

The estate has medieval origins, with a deer park recorded from around 1161. A hunting lodge was erected by the 4th Earl of Shrewsbury in the 1530s. In the 1580s a magnificent new house was raised for George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, almost certainly to the designs of Robert Smythson. Comprising approximately 500 rooms and set within a park of over 2,300 acres, it was a leading example of the Elizabethan prodigy house. The manor served as a place of imprisonment for Mary, Queen of Scots in 1580, and subsequently received members of the Stuart royal family in the early seventeenth century.

Ownership passed through marriage to the Howard family, Dukes of Norfolk, in the early seventeenth century. Under the 8th and 9th Dukes the house was substantially enlarged and its gardens extensively remodelled. In October 1761 a catastrophic fire destroyed the Smythson house entirely, at a loss estimated at £100,000. The architect James Paine was commissioned to design a palatial replacement, intended for the nephew of the childless 9th Duke. The successive deaths of the expected heirs in 1763 and 1767 brought work to a halt with only one wing complete. The unfinished structure fell into neglect after 1777 and was largely demolished in the late 1830s by the 4th Duke of Newcastle, who acquired the estate principally to extend his neighbouring landholdings at Clumber Park.

The surviving portions — the stable block, service wing, and part of the eastern range — were subsequently reformed into the present house, which has been in private ownership since the late nineteenth century and is not open to the public. The estate is home to the Worksop Manor Stud, a thoroughbred breeding establishment in operation since at least 1890.

The Lords of the Manor of Worksop hold their tenure by the ancient feudal privilege of grand serjeanty, which obliges them to present the sovereign with a glove and to support the royal right arm during the coronation ceremony — a custom observed at British coronations from at least the reign of James II. Worksop Manor was the seat of the ancient Lords of Worksop.