“There is an entrance court in front of the house, enclosed by a wall. It is approached through one of the quaint gate-houses of the time, which were a reminiscence of a more turbulent state of society, when it was necessary for all who went to the house to do so under the porter’s eye, but which in the calmer times of Elizabeth were occupied by some of the numerous functionaries who ministered to the pleasures of the rich. The detail at Doddington is of the plainest, the only attempt at richness being round the front door. The windows are of reasonable size, the strings are narrow, and are all of the same quasi-classic profile. The parapet is perfectly plain, and the roof is without gables, the sky-line being broken, as at Barlborough, with turrets, formed by carrying up the porch and the two projections in the internal angles of the front. The house is an example of a plain and businesslike type, which may be accounted for by the fact that it was built for a business man, one Thomas Tailor, Registrar to the Bishop of Lincoln.”[131] [Illustration: DODDINGTON HALL.] What style Thomas Tailor kept up in his stately mansion we cannot tell, but that he had not impaired his fortune in the building of it is evident from his will, proved at Lincoln, 30th November 1607, in which he disposes of considerable sums of money, while the inquisition taken after his death sets forth in detail his numerous landed estates. Though his two wives and most of his children had been buried at St. Martin’s Church, Lincoln, he willed his “bodie to be buried in the parishe church of Doddington.” He was buried there on 26th November 1607, as we learn from the transcript of a former parish register, though there is nothing to mark the place.