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Shibden Hall

Families at Shibden

Various families have lived here over the centuries. The name most people associate with Shibden Hall is that of the Lister family.

But there were others who also played a great part in its history.

1420 - 1504

The first family associated with Shibden were the Otes. William Otes was a cloth merchant, who built what was in 1420, a modern house supported by its own farm.

Exactly what the house looked like is not certain, but the central H-plan of Shibden with its half-timbered gables either side was probably its final extent.

His grandson, William, ultimately inherited Shibden and lived there with his wife and daughter, Joan. In 1456, despairing of further children, William wrote his will in Joan’s favour. But Joan’s mother died and, late in his life, William remarried and had a son, Gilbert. Despite his father’s will, Gilbert believed he should inherit Shibden by the right of primogeniture, being the eldest son, and therefore, keeping the Hall in the family.

But this was not to be. He underestimated his sister and her husband’s family.

Joan had married Robert Savile, the second son of the Saviles of Elland Old Hall, already a powerful family in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Their wealth, position, and determination to consolidate their land-holdings, encouraged them to contest Gilbert Otes’ claim. Between 1491 and 1504 the ownership of Shibden was in the hands of the court which finally decided in Joan and Robert Savile’s favour.

1504 - 1598

So the early sixteenth-century saw the Saviles as the new owners at Shibden. They had no sons and their daughter Sybil married into another established family passing the ownership of the Hall on to the Waterhouses.

The Waterhouse family made their fortune as tax collectors and by just and unjust methods become wealthy enough for John, son of Robert and Sybil, to purchase the manor of Halifax-cum-Heptonstall in 1545 and become Lord of the Manor, at the cost of £150 5s 10d.

John married Joan Bosville and they had eleven children. Robert, the eldest inherited Shibden on the death of his father in 1583. He resided there as Lord of the Manor of Halifax with his wife and their first two children whilst running a flourishing law practice in York.

In 1584 he was elected MP for Aldborough in North Yorkshire and moved to London. Whilst away he organised extensive improvements to the family home, extending the house, redecorating and purchasing new furniture. When he died in 1598 he left a property that he had significantly enlarged and a substantial fortune he had consolidated.

1598 - 1615

His son, Edward, unfortunately did not take after Robert, he neglected his duty to his family and his home and ran up major debts. He mortgaged Shibden in 1604-5 and two years later sold the Manor of Halifax. He never resolved his financial difficulties. Even after selling Shibden to a wealthy local woman, Widow Crowther, for £1600 in 1612 he was still declared bankrupt in 1614.

Widow Crowther bought Shibden on behalf of her nephew, John Hemingway. His uncle, Samuel Lister, a cloth merchant, was the tenant there. In 1615 the widow died, as did John’s father. Still under age, John was made ward of the Crown and Samuel was appointed guardian to John and his four sisters. But John too died, still not of age, leaving the four girls as Samuel’s heirs.

1615 - 1826

The Lister family was already established in Halifax and Hull. Samuel was married with children of his own when he took on the guardianship of the four girls. The idea of marrying his sons to his nieces must have occurred to him. In 1619 his eldest son Thomas married his cousin Sybil and in 1625 John married Phoebe. The girls brought to their marriages the ownership of Shibden Hall, adding prestige to the Lister family.

Thomas Lister inherited Shibden and from there he observed the upheaval of the English Civil War. He lived to the great age of 80 and had at least five children, the eldest of whom, Samuel inherited the Hall in 1650. But Thomas’s line ended in the third generation and a cousin, James Lister, a descendant of Thomas’s brother John, took over.

James came from Upper Brea, on the far side of the valley from Shibden he also inherited his father’s apothecary practice. He made and dispensed medicines and, as a professional man was relatively well-off.

His children were well educated and his eldest son, John, read divinity at St John’s College, Cambridge later becoming curate at Doncaster church before inheriting Shibden in 1729.

The Reverend John was the Head of Bury Grammar School until 1749. He never married and died in a hunting accident in 1759. The estate passed into the hands of his nephew James, who lived there quietly with his sister Anne. James did not marry either and when he died in 1826 his niece Anne took over the management of Shibden and after the death of both her father and her aunt she became its sole owner.

1826 - 1934

Anne was 34 years old when she inherited Shibden from her Uncle James. She was a remarkable woman; an intrepid traveller, an astute business woman and, as her diaries disclose, a lesbian.

She started to keep a diary while at Manor School in York in 1806, but from 1815 her journal becomes a detailed record of her life and everything that affected her: her emotions, her day-to-day activities, her financial situation, local and national news, even a daily weather report and the books she was reading.

She recorded her ‘marriage’ to local heiress, Ann Walker in 1834. The journal became Anne’s passion; some days are recorded in over 2,000 words. Twenty-seven volumes survive, comprising almost 4 million words and recording 34 years of her life. It is indexed and cross referenced, and provides an accurate record of the life of one woman at the end of the Georgian era.

Anne made many alterations to the estate throughout her tenure:

• she made a park, constructed a cascade through a wilderness and made an ornamental lake.
• a carriage drive was built to the new road from Halifax to Leeds, and a gatehouse built alongside it.
• a Norman style tower was built with flushing WC and library.
• the low ceiling in the Housebody was removed opening the room to the eaves and decorated in “Jacobethan” style.

But travel was never far from Anne’s thoughts. In June 1839 she set out to undertake her longest journey yet, overland to Russia. Unfortunately it was also to be her last. She contracted a fever which proved fatal and died in 1840, miles away from Shibden Hall in the Caucasus mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas.

Ann Walker, Anne’s companion, inherited a lifetime’s interest in Shibden Hall, provided that she did not marry. Unfortunately her mental stability was in doubt and her family had her forcibly removed from Shibden into an asylum in York. For the next twelve years the property was home to several families and it was not until Ann Walker died in 1855 that the heirs whom Anne Lister had identified moved to Shibden.

Those heirs were Dr John Lister, his wife Louisa and their children John, Charles and Anne. Dr Lister was a practising doctor in Sandown on the Isle of Wight when he inherited Shibden and the family travelled between their two homes.

John, the eldest son, who was 8 when the family first moved into the house, was 20 when he inherited the house upon his father's death in 1867. He was extremely proud of his inheritance showing people around Shibden and sharing its history with like-minded people. He cracked the code of Anne’s diary and was instrumental in trying to preserve Tudor Halifax, He stood as a Liberal councillor in Yorkshire and was a founder member of the Independent Labour party and the Halifax Antiquarian Society.

In 1923 when John Lister was 76, the bank called in the mortgages. It was a cruel blow. All John’s money had been invested in charitable works and maintaining his beloved home. John’s friend, Mr A S McCrea, a Halifax councillor, came to the rescue. He purchased 90 acres of parkland which he presented to the people of east Halifax as a public park and also bought the reversion of Shibden Hall, which allowed John and his sister to live out their lives here. Anne died in 1929, John in 1933. Shibden was handed over to the (then) Halifax Corporation in 1933. After much discussion, the Corporation decided to open it as a museum on the 4th June 1934.

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