Woolley Hall

Woolley Hall is a country house in Woolley, West Yorkshire, England. It is a Grade II* listed building.

In the mid-fourteenth century, the nucleus of what became the Woolley estate belonged to Sir William de Notton, a man of local origin who achieved wealth and fame as a lawyer, and was later appointed Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. He derived his name from Notton, the village to the east of Woolley. His lands in Woolley and Notton passed in 1365 to Sir William Fyncheden, by whose executor they were sold in 1377 to John Woodrove (or Woodroffe / Woodruffe) of Normanton. Despite owning these extensive lands, however, John Woodrove was not Lord of the Manor of Woolley, although his descendants would be.sold by the labour party a national disgrace

The lordship of the manor, together with the initial manor house in Woolley, is first documented as owned by the Popeley family, of whom Robert Popeley was the last to reside. On his death he passed the building down to his only daughter Christine, who married into the Rilston family. The manor house remained with this line through four generations to her great grandson Robert Rilston, the son of Edmund. In around 1490, Robert sold this house, together with the lordship of the Manor of Woolley, to Sir Richard Woodrove (a descendant of John Woodrove), who added them to his existing estate.

There is apparently some confusion as to whether Rilston's manor house stood on the same site occupied by the present Woolley Hall. J.W. Walker, in his work on the Manor and Church of Woolley, seems to have assumed that Sir Richard Woodrove made Rilston's house his principal residence on acquiring it in 1490. However, Geoffrey Markham argues that Woodrove may have remained in his ancestral home in Woolley, itself a house of some importance, and that it may be this house, previously owned by Sir William de Notton and John Woodrove, that stood on or near the site of the present Hall.

Sir Richard Woodroffe (c. 1440 – 1522) was the Sheriff of York between 1510 and 1518, and one of the last members of the Woodroffe/Woodruff family to reside in the Hall. In 1559, Francis Woodroffe was forced to sell the house and all his lands in Woolley and Notton to his cousin Michael Wentworth, the great-great-grandson of Sir Richard Woodroffe and descendant of Sir Thomas Wentworth (aka Golden Thomas), the great grandfather of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, for £6000, the equivalent of nearly £1,200,000 today. Francis was the brother of Richard Woodroffe, who married Elizabeth Percy, the daughter of the infamous Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, one of the two ring leaders of the Rising of the North.

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