Kinlet Hall

Kinlet is one of Shropshire’s documented mansions by Francis Smith of Warwick, built for William Lacon Childe, MP for Shropshire, 1727–9. A handsome stone-dressed house of brick, with a main block of seven bays and two-and-a-half-storeys flanked by dumpy hipped-roofed pavilions of four bays and two storeys, the building has considerable presence upon the crown of a hill at the centre of its former park of 1,200 acres. The tree shrouded church of St John the Baptist stands at a distance to the south of the mansion, the sole survivor of the medieval village of Kinlet which was removed for the creation of the Childes’ park in the late eighteenth century. The Childe family had succeeded to Kinlet in a line of continuous descent – albeit often through the female line – from Bernard Fitz Unspac, who owned the manor in the twelfth century. Before that time, Kinlet had been a property of Edith, Queen of Edward the Confessor. From Fitz Unspac, the estate passed to the Bryans de Brampton, or Brompton. Their heiress, Elizabeth, carried it to the Cornwall family with her marriage to Edward de Cornwall in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. In the later fourteenth century, Kinlet passed to Isobel, the daughter of Sir John Cornwall, MP, and the wife of Sir William Lichfield. Lichfield was sheriff of Shropshire in 1428, but his wife’s death in 1415 cut short the Lichfield succession. She is probably commemorated by the alabaster effigy figure in the parish church – this is a richly-dressed lady with a child wrapped in a shroud, having angels supporting the pillow, suggesting that she died in childbirth. The heir of a sister of Isobel’s father, though, had married a younger member of the Blount family of Sodington (see Mawley q.v.), and thus Kinlet became a seat of the Blounts until the end of the sixteenth century. Their ownership of the estate is proudly commemorated by the series of monuments in St John’s. These rank amongst the finest examples of Tudor sculptures in Britain, suggesting that the house at Kinlet would have been of some pretensions.

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