The hall is strongly associated with the Delaval family who can trace their origins back to Norman times when a certain Guy De La Val came over to Britain with William the Conqueror. The most notorious members of this family were the practical joking brothers Lord Delaval and Sir Francis Blake Delaval, who lived here in the 1700s. Their pranks included placing trapdoors under the beds of house guests who haplessly dropped through the floor into huge tanks of water in the middle of the night. On one other occasion after retiring for the evening, unfortunate guests found themselves exposed to each other after undressing and dewigging in their bedrooms. The Delavals had fitted sliding walls to the rooms, which were pulled up into the ceiling by means of a pulley.
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