page_title: Forty Hall
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Forty Hall / History
caption_attribution_description: Forty Hall, Enfield, stable gateway built around 1650
context_page_description: Forty Hall is a manor house of the 1620s in Forty Hill in Enfield, north London. The house, a Grade I listed building, is today used as a museum by the London Borough of Enfield. Within the grounds is the site of the former Tudor Elsyng Palace.
context_section_description: The house was built between 1629 and 1632. It is generally said to have been built by Sir Nicholas Raynton or Rainton, a wealthy London haberdasher who was Lord Mayor of London from 1632 to 1633. However Tuff, writing in 1858, says that it was built by Sir Hugh Fortee and bought by Raynton, quoting a 1635 survey describing a copyhold house "some time Hugh Fortee's, and late Sir Thomas Gurney's". Lambert also gives Fortee as the origin of the name.
  The detailed history of the house has until recently been poorly understood, since it is known to have been built in the 1620s, but has the external appearance of an 18th-century house. A detailed examination was carried out for Enfield council as part of the Forty Hall Conservation Plan. This concluded that the house was probably not designed by a  famous architect such as Inigo Jones, but by a "clever artisan builder".
  The original square house was not altered much in the 17th century other than a small extension to the north-west in 1636. In 1640 Rainton was imprisoned for refusing to help Charles I raise a loan. He died in 1646 aged 77 and was buried at St Andrew's Church in Enfield. The hall then passed to his great-nephew, also Nicholas. He was able to extend the estate northwards by buying and demolishing the neighbouring Elsyng Palace in 1656. In 1696 the hall passed to John Wolstenholme (probably a descendant of the financier and merchant of the same name and member of the Virginia Company), who carried out major refurbishment possibly following a fire, including construction of an extension to the south-west, and planted the avenue. In 1740 the house passed to Eliab Breton, who remodelled the ground floor. Later owners included Edmund Armstrong (1787) and James Meyer (1799), whose family built the nearby Jesus Church in 1835. In 1894 the hall was bought by Henry Carrington Bowles of the neighbouring Myddelton House for his son Major Henry Ferryman Bowles (1858–1943), MP for Enfield and later 1st Baronet Bowles. In 1897 there were further changes including enlargement of the south-west wing. In 1951 the Bowles family sold it to the Municipal Borough of Enfield, the predecessor of the London Borough of Enfield. It has since been used as a museum.
  The Hall closed to the public in late 2010 for a major redevelopment project funded by Enfield Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Alterations  included the restoration of the original position  of the staircase. The Hall reopened on 30 June 2012.
caption: Stable gateway (c.1650)
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Make": "KONICA MINOLTA", "Image Model": "DYNAX 7D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "DYNAX 7D v1.10", "Image DateTime": "2008:02:22 14:59:06", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "402", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 0, 6, 0, 1, 0, 22, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "40294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3270", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/90", "EXIF FNumber": "8", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:02:22 14:59:06", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:02:22 14:59:06", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "7", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "26", "EXIF SubjectArea": "[752, 500, 1504, 1000]", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1504", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1000", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "39212", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "39", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}