Oxburgh Hall Norfolk
Oxburgh Hall in the Norfolk Breckland is a moated manor house of extraordinary architectural beauty and historical richness, a late fifteenth-century building of warm red brick rising from its wide rectangular moat in a composition of towers, gatehouse and domestic ranges that is one of the finest examples of medieval domestic architecture in eastern England. The National Trust manages the hall and its estate, and the combination of the building, the needlework collection within, the priest's hole, the French parterre garden and the Catholic chapel make Oxburgh one of the most rewarding and most layered historic house visits in Norfolk. The hall was built by Sir Edmund Bedingfield in 1482 and has remained in the Bedingfield family's ownership and occupation, latterly in partnership with the National Trust, for over five centuries, giving it an unusual quality of continuous family habitation rather than the sometimes institutional character of houses long separated from their original owners. The family's unwavering Catholic faith through the Reformation, recusancy and the penal years that followed created a history of particular interest, the priest's hole hidden within the gatehouse fabric providing direct physical evidence of the dangerous practice of sheltering Catholic priests when the penalty for doing so was death. The embroidery collection includes needlework by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick, created during Mary's captivity at Tutbury and at Chatsworth in the 1570s and of outstanding quality as a collection of Tudor decorative art. The pieces worked by the imprisoned Scottish queen, whose situation of luxurious captivity gave her extraordinary amounts of time for needlework, are among the most intimate surviving objects associated with one of history's most compelling figures. The French parterre garden and the Victorian kitchen garden provide excellent outdoor interest to complement the house visit.