Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire
This collection has 219 items online
Little Moreton Hall is a great survivor of the Tudor period and this is reflected within its collections. Although the collection is small, there are objects which can trace their lineage back to the inventories of 1563 and 1599, as well as a collection of interesting late Elizabethan painted murals and 16th century heraldic glass and a collection of pewter. The Moreton family experienced changing fortunes, making their fortunes by buying land after the Black Death of 1348 and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and losing much in the Civil War for their Royalist sympathies. By the early 18th Century, the family left the house and rented it and the lands out to tenant farmers for a further 200 years, with the condition they were not to change the hall’s appearance. Elizabeth Moreton carried out restoration work in the late 19th Century and passed the hall to her cousin Bishop Abraham, who handed the hall to the National Trust in 1938. In five centuries, it has never been sold.
