Bayons Manor

Description

Bayon's Manor was built around 1840 as a complex including remains of an icehouse and east gateway with joining wall, and fragmentary north curtain wall. It was built by the Tennyson family who owned around a third of the village in the late 18th century, Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt took around seven years to built the large 60-roomed mansion of Bayons Manor, supposedly on the site of an earlier medieval fortification. The new country house was built in a extravegant neo-gothic style.
The ruined buildings were constructed in Ironstone ashlar. There are the reamins of anovergrown icehouse, while the original octagonal tower has been demolished and only the lower, circular portions are extant with a doorway on the north side. An overgrown heap of rubble to the west is all that remains of the great keep. The manor was sold in 1944 and blown up in 1964. The cottage of Bayons manor to the south-west was the original home of the Tennyson family and is still extant today. (PastScape)

Comments

Categorised, among other things, as a medieval castle in PastScape. The theatrical C19 neo-gothic castle, with moat and drawbridge, sadly demolished in 1965, certainly fills the romantic image of a castle. It is said to have been built on the site of C17 manor house and this may have been the site of a medieval manor house (although some of the, poor quality online, accounts seem to suggest the medieval manor house was on a slightly different site). Certainly the builder of the C19 house, Charles Tennyson, who changed his name to d'Eyncourt (a Norman family able to trace a line back to a knight of the Norman conquest) and the name of the house from Tealby Hall to Bayons Manor (supposedly a corruption of Bayeux and a link to Bishop Odo) was a romantic and may have well either created or merely grossly exaggerated a story of the medieval manor house being a castle. It may be that the absence of this house from any of the usual castle studies gazetteers is that the story of a medieval castle is such an obvious fabrication that the actual nature of the medieval manor house has been overlooked. Tealby was reasonably wealthy manor in the Lincolnshire Wolds and the medieval manor house may well have been moated and otherwise dressed up with martial features like battlements but the evidence for this is scant.
In 1807 a coarse glazed urn containing nearly 6000 silver pennies of Henry II was found in a field in the parish, but on the high land near a road, not in association with the manor. Presumably this represented a horde of a traveller, hidden in a crude pot and buried for safety and never recovered.