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HOLKHAM HOUSE, 



NORFOLK. 



THE SEAT OF THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF LEICESTER. 



XIOLKHAM, written in Domesday " Holcha," is a parish in the hundred of North Greenhoe, the 

 principal lordship whereof was granted by the Conqueror to Tovi, one of his attendants, on the deprivation 

 of Ketel, who Was lord in the time of Edward the Confessor, when there belonged to it three carucates 

 of arable land, two villains, eight bordars, and five servi ; there were two carucates in demesne, a rood 

 of meadow land, a mill, four cows, twenty-one swine, and three hundred sheep ; there were eighteen 

 socmen, with all their customary dues, who held fifty-six acres of land and two carucates, and of these 

 he had the soc. To this lordship three freemen were added ; two of them under the protection of 

 Harold, and the other under that of Gers, who held a carucate and a half of land under Tovi's predecessor, 

 nine bordars, and seven socmen, with four carucates and sixteen acres of land belonging to them ; the 

 whole was then valued at £6, afterwards, and at the survey, at £8 per annum, and paid two shillings 

 gelt. Shortly afterwards it passed by escheat to the Crown, and William II granted it to his favourite, 

 William de Albini, the ancestor of the Earls of Arundel. From this time till 1572 it passed through 

 many hands, but at that date it was purchased by William Wheatley, Esquire, who was succeeded by 

 his son, whose daughter carried it in marriage to John Coke, Esquire, fourth son of Sir Edward Coke, 

 the celebrated Lord Chief Justice of England, by whose noble descendants the property is still held. 

 The mansion is of a most magnificent character, and consists of a centre and four wings, which are connected 

 by rectilinear corridors or galleries. It was begun in the year 1734, from designs by the Earl of Leicester, 

 and finished by his dowager Countess 1760. The centre, composed of white brick, extends three hundred 

 and forty-five feet in length, by one hundred and eighty in depth, and comprises the principal apartments, 

 which contain several exquisite specimens of sculpture and painting. The north front is the grand or 

 principal entrance, and is approached through a triumphal arch of the Doric order, from which there is 

 a beautiful vista, looking on the Obelisk* in the centre of the park, formed by lines of fine trees a 

 mile and a half in length. Over the entrance doorway into the hall, which is in the form of a cube, 

 with a gallery running round it supported by twenty-four Ionic columns, is this characteristic inscription — 



The Obelisk was the first work on the estate, and completed in the year 1729 



