Malsis Hall in Glusburn, Yorkshire was built by James Lund, the son of a Keighley worsted manufacturer. I could just stop there but this is the part where you come to expect lots of old dates and names to pop up in an attempt at telling the story of who built the place.
Well, you guessed right! The building you see in the following images is the most modern, if you can call it that, of several iterations of its kind on the site. There had been a hall at Malsis since the Middle Ages. Members of the Copley family of Batley resided at the first hall at Malsis for a period of almost 300 years until the 1540s when houses in Malsis were burned down during a period of civil unrest arising from opposition to the enclosure of the common fields and the process of shaping britains rural landscape began.
As the land in Glusburn took shape, a new hall was then built by Alvery Copley in about 1550. Today the only surviving evidence of this Tudor hall is the armorial that was once displayed above the main entrance. By the 19th century the dilapidated hall came into Lund’s possession after he married the owner’s daughter Mary Sarah Spencer in 1852 shortly before inheriting his own father’s wealth. Clearly fortune comes in pairs for some!
It is an impressive declaration of the Copley’s long connection with Malsis and displays six shields emblazoned with the family coat of arms. Each shield represented one of Alvery Copley’s ancestors who had been lords of Malsis.
The penultimate version of Malsis hall before it was rebuilt in 1866. A new italianate wing with belvedere tower was built on the right hand side of the building, roughly doubling it in size.
After the hall's extension you can see how much larger the new wing is compared to the old.
In 1861 James took over the Malsis estate, and rebuilt the landmark property, which was completed in 1866. It was built in the Italian style from stone quarried on its own 750-acre estate, and it amply fulfilled a favourite adjective of the period – massive.
The italiate design was not just limited to the exterior remodelling of the hall. Inside the new wing, a vast eccentric ceiling was decorated that can only truly be depicted using a wide angle lens.
One of the only images of the dining hall in it's original use during the Lund family's tenure.
The attention to detail on this ceiling truly was second to none.
Lund lived at the hall until his death in 1901, after which the Lund family sold the hall to Sir John Horsfall of Hayfield, Glusburn in 1919 and he let the property to Malsis School who would eventually buy the estate and convert it into a prepatory school, inventively named, who would’ve guessed, Malsis prep school, in 1920.
