Places features

Oakwell Hall: The 17th century revisited

Home to the Batt family between the 16th and 19th centuries, Oakwell Hall still feels very much like a cosy retreat from a busy world. However, that doesn't mean the house and its inhabitants have been hiding away from real life over the past four centuries - far from it. After all, not only was Oakwell just a musket shot away from one of the Civil War's most significant battles, but it also has its own rather bloody ghost. And, on a lighter note, it can also count famous author Charlotte Brontė among its past guests - someone who went on to write about the house in one of her most celebrated novels. Despite the march of time, though, Oakwell has changed very little since the 17th century. In fact, as Eric Brown, Senior Museum Officer at the Hall, describes it: "It's just like stepping back in time."

Oakwell: Window on the past

Taking a trip back 400 years can be quite an eye-opening experience - especially when you delve into the history of a family who had, as the Batts certainly did, quite a 'colourful' reputation. Scandal, as Eric Brown explains, is certainly not a modern invention: "There are all sorts of stories associated with the Batts. Henry and his son John were supposedly implicated in the theft of some church bells for resale; [they were responsible] for purloining funds set aside for the building of a school for poor and under-privileged children; and for the illegal demolition of a rectory for building stone. We've got this image of them perhaps not like the Trotter family, but more like Black Adder! You'd hate for a bland and dull family to have lived in this house and they certainly weren't."

Painted Chamber: Spot the ghost...

Blood and death had unfortunately already become part of Oakwell's story years before William's untimely demise thanks to a major Civil War battle which took place almost literally on the Batts' doorstep on 30th June 1643. The Battle of Adwalton Moor saw the Royalists - the losing side in the War and the side the Batts supported at the time - score a victory against the Parliamentary troops. Eric outlines what happened on that fateful day: "It was at a time when the Royalists were in the ascendant. They won that battle and the Parliamentary forces retreated with many of the defeated forces under Thomas Fairfax, quite a legendary general, retreating past Oakwell Hall down Warren Lane which is now the driveway at the side past the Hall. Supposedly, the story goes, because of the number of dead, dying and injured soldiers, it got the nickname Bloody Lane. John Batt, who lived in the Hall at the time of the Civil War, was a captain in the Royalist forces and although we don't know it for sure, we strongly suspect that he will have fought at that battle as well."

It was while Oakwell Hall was a boarding school that it played host to its most famous visitor, Charlotte Brontė. Eric Brown says the house has very strong connections with this particular member of the celebrated Brontė trio: "Charlotte visited Oakwell quite frequently while in the area because her friend Ellen Nussey was involved in running the girls' school. And while visiting Ellen on, I guess, quite a few occasions she got the inspiration to use Oakwell Hall as 'Fieldhead' in the novel 'Shirley'...The description of Oakwell Hall really describes it as it is today. It'll have changed little since Charlotte's visits."

Eric Brown: Oakwell enthusiast!

Eric Brown says if there's one thing he hopes people will take away from their visit, it's a taste of what life was like in this part of Yorkshire 400 years ago: "I want them to feel that they've stepped back into the 17th century and got an impression, even a fleeting one, of what life was like then...It's a fascinating house in the way that it's touched people. A lot of people have a lot of love and affection for it." And while the 21st century continues to breeze unthinkingly by in the unlovely form of the M62, Eric says he and the staff at Oakwell Hall promise to continue caring for this 17th century oasis which is so near and yet so far from the madness of modern life: "We think it's going to last another four or five hundred years at least and we'd like to think we're playing a role in looking after it."