<p style='text-align: justify;'><p>1820</p><p>Labelled ‘Landwade Manor House. Seat of ye Cotton Family from 1393. 1820’. Benton adds a note from <i>Gardner’s History of Cambridgeshire 1850’</i>. ‘The old manor house...has been pulled down, and a new castellated mansion in the Elizabethan style is being erected on its site. This splendid structure is of red brick faced with cut stone and surrounded by a moat with two draw-bridges; when completed it will be the handsomest mansion in the county. Messrs Bell and Sons of Cambridge are the builders. The grounds are being laid out with much taste by Mr Alexander Cotton and the neighbourhood is well wooded. The drawings (at Messrs Bells, Saffron Walden), are dated 1847, and show this note ‘The whole pulled down and materials sold 1854’. </p><p>A manor house within the surviving moat existed from C13, had a gate 4m wide in 1407, and was acquired by Walter Cotton (a London dealer in textiles) by 1428. Around 1559 there was major rebuilding in brick, with mullioned and transomed windows and stone ornamental features. More improvements were paid for in 1642. Sir John Cotton (d. 1689) was doing well, becoming a baronet and sheriff of Cambs, but was exiled for his role as a Royalist in the Civil War. When he returned to England in 1661 he was able to add 5 more rooms to the house and to marry his son, yet another Sir John (Tory MP for Cambridge and Cambs 1708-1741), to Jane Hinde, heiress to the Madingley estate (<b>259</b>). After this, Madingley became the Cottons’ family seat. Ownership of the joint estate passed to the next Sir John (d. 1795), also an MP, then to Admiral Sir Charles Cotton (d. 1812) (<b>257)</b>, then his son Sir St Vincent Cotton, who sold it to his brother Alexander in 1850. Landwade Hall would have been of little importance to any of these men, and by 1808 it was in disrepair and used as a farmhouse by tenants. This is the picturesque but unfashionable and rather workaday house, although still with fine windows and gables, that Relhan drew in 1820, with many of its windows unglazed. It is shown standing alone in a landscape of trees and grass, with a moat that is revetted with red brick like those of the house. Figures include a grazing chestnut horse near a man looking suspiciously like the shepherd in (<b>238) </b>except he is holding a pitchfork not a crook (Relhan senior posing?), 2 horned cows with a seated man just outside the moat, and an elegant white greyhound with a golden circlet around its neck, the most aristocratic part of this pleasant peaceful scene. The house is coming to an end at this time for, although still in the same family, the owners had prospered too much and married too well and had outgrown it, especially when it fell into the hands of the rakish St Vincent Cotton. In 1846 John Chessell Buckler, antiquary and church restorer, built a new house for St Vincent’ brother Alexander Cotton, ‘<i>the handsomest mansion in the county’</i>, still within the old moat, but the expense was too much, Cotton went bankrupt and this house was demolished almost immediately after it had been opened for public admiration in 1854 (see the note above). A C17 farmhouse outside the moated area became known as Landwade Hall and a new house was built around its C17 stone core. The present Landwade Hall is a mix of different buildings, with remains of stone mullioned windows, c.1600, built into it, with C20 remodelling. Of Relhan’s Landwade Hall there remains only the moat, with a brick bridge, picturesque gazebo, ornamental trees and a grassy area.</p><p>Palmer 1939; VCH 2002; Watkins 1981 </p></p>
