A more recent manor-house was built about the reign of James I.,
adjoining the tower on the east, and portions of it are built into the
present farmhouse. For some generations it was a seat of the Royalist
family of Collingwood, and, at an earlier date, of a branch of the great
house of Bowes. It was a lady of this family, Maud, wife of Sir William
Bowes and heiress of Sir Robert Dalden, who possessed within the old
walls a curious library. In her will, made in 1420, she left to Matilda
Hilton _one Romaunce-boke_, to Dame Eleanor Washington _the boke with
the knotts_, to Elizabeth de Whitchester a book that is called
_Trystram_, and to her god-daughter Maud, daughter of the Baron of
Hilton, _one Romaunce boke is called the Gospells_. Surtees pertinently
writes: "Did a romance ever actually exist under this strange title? or
had the lady of Dalden met with one of Wicliffe’s Bibles, and conceived
the Gospels to be a series of fabulous adventures, in which our Saviour
and His Apostles were introduced to act and to moralize like the goodly
personages who figure in the ancient mysteries, or in _Les Jeux du Roi
René d’Anjou_"?
Farther to the south an old tower, oblong in shape stood at Little Eden.
It was, however, taken down in the early days of last century by Mr.
Rowland Burdon, who erected the present castellated house at Castle
Eden. At Dinsdale, on the banks of the Tees, the remains of the ancient
home of the Surtees family were excavated by the late Mr. Scott Surtees,
and showed that a large gatehouse of late twelfth-century work, with
vaulted chambers and a newel stair, had once stood there.
The later manor-house of the Place family retains some portions of the
older building. With thick walls and low rooms with heavy beams and
rafters, and an old oak staircase with a wicket, it still remains a
picturesque fragment of former days. A stone originally fixed over a
gateway destroyed shortly before Hutchinson compiled his history is now
let into the wall on the left of the farmhouse door, and bears the arms
of Place quarterly with Surtees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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