What should we make of Sir Nicholas Mosley who built Hough End Hall, made a fortune and was judged as “covetous and illiberal"?

Hough End Hall has one of those long and rich histories which pretty much has all you would want from a building dating back to 1596.*

The Hall from a print circa 1849

It was built by Sir Nicholas Mosley who made his fortune in London and was gambled away by one  of his descendants a century and bit later.

Its first owner had been at the heart of national politics during the reign of the first Elizabeth, another of the Mosley’s saw the hall and estates temporally confiscated by Parliament during the Civil War, after which the place settled down and fell out of the great events of State finally ending up as humble farm house for two centuries.

Now I have never been over bothered with looking into the story of Sir Nicholas Mosley.

Like most people I contented myself with the knowledge that he made that fortune In London, was rewarded by Queen Elizabeth I for his service to London and his country with a knighthood and  “a handsomely-carved oak bedstead, together with some other articles of furniture, for the new house which he had recently erected at Hough End, on the site of the old mansion which his ancestors had inhabited.”**

And in the fullness of time retired to his magnificent home where he died aged 85 in 1612.

But as I delved into the history of the Hall for the book* I became drawn to the man.

mural monument of Sir Nicholas, 1612

His own biographer wrote that his character “has been variously represented; his enemies reproaching him as covetous and illiberal, whilst his friends eulogised his skill, industry and hospitality.”

What is certain is that he left money in his will for a school in Chorlton and may have been involved in other “good works.”

That said I am intrigued by the view of him as “covetous and illiberal” which may have been more to do with a ruthless determination to do well.

After all he was nearly in his 50s when he left Manchester for London and within twelve years was elected an alderman for one of the City wards, became a sheriff in 1590 and Lord Mayor nine years later.

Likewise his business prospered and on the back of this growing wealth he acquired the manors of Manchester, Withington, Cheetham and Cheetwood and went on to maximise the income from these lands asserting old rights and increasing fines.

“In 1602 the burgesses of Manchester claimed that Mosley had worked ‘to alter, overthrowe and change all the auncient priviledges, usages and customs” such as common pasturage in 100 acres of Collyhurst, which had hitertoo benefited the burgesses and the town as a place of recreation, shooting, mustering troops and the placing of cabins for plague victims.”***

Hough End Hall 1853

Of course he was not alone  in maximising his income, plenty of Elizabethan landlords were doing the same and the practice of enclosures and taking away the rights to common land stretched back into the early 16th century.

Sir Thomas More in his book on Utopia published in 1516 had commented that because sheep farming was far more profitable than arable farming
“ the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.”****

All of which is a fine new slant on that magnificent hall at Hough End, which just leaves me with the charitable and optimistic words of his descendant Sir Oliver Mosley who in 1849 concluded that determining Si Nicholas’s character
“at this distant period very difficult to decide...... His abilities and success as a merchant have been universally admitted, and perhaps the great gains which accompanied his worldly pursuits might too much engross his attention; but we will charitably hope that many opportunities afforded him, during a long life, for repentance, were not neglected.”*****

I hope so but as yet I fear the jury is still out.

Pictures; Hough End Hall, 1849, and Sir Nichloas Mosley’s mural monument, 1612 in Didsbury parish church from Family Memoirs, Mosley, Sir Oswald, the Hall in 1853 from Booker, Rev John, A history of the ancient Chapels of Didsbury and Chorlton, 1857, Cheetham Society cover for the book Hough End Hall to be published in late 2014

* Hough End Hall the Story, Simpson Andrew, Topping, Peter Topping, 2012

** Mosley, Sir Oswald, Family Memoirs, 1849, Printed for Private Circulation, page 6

*** Bowd, Stephen, John Dee and Christopher Saxton’s Survey of Manchester,(1596), Northern History, XLII:2, September 2005

****More, Sir Thomas, Utopia, 1516
*****ibid Mosley, Sir Oswald