Tucked away in the Peak District’s wild rolling hills lies the Tissington Estate.
Eight generations of the FitzHerbert family have lived in this beautiful Jacobean Mansion, which presides over a quintessentially English village, complete with duck pond and village green.
‘The beauty of Tissington, as with many an English village, is the result of evolution. No planner designed it, no bureaucrat decided how and where the houses were to be built. The village grew in that effortless and instinctive way that villages did before the Industrial Revolution began to change the face of England.
There are wide green spaces and the houses, scattered about, are unintentional and unselfconscious architectural gems. The by-road to Tissington is flanked by a lodge and large stone gate-piers and is lined by an avenue of limes. These trees were planted in 1970 by the late Sir John FitzHerbert to take over from the Victorian avenue that had to be cut down in 1991/92 as a result of rot and decay.’ Sir Richard FitzHerbert
The history of Tissington can be traced back as far as 1086, when it is mentioned as Tizinctun in the Domesday Book, among the possessions of Henry de Ferrers. Evidence of even earlier occupation of the area is amply afforded by the results of excavations in the neighbourhood, which have disclosed Bronze Age human remains, Anglo Saxon burials, and earlier Celtic remains.
Evidence of man’s early occupation of the Tissington area has been amply afforded by several excavations that have been made in the neighbourhood at various times in the past, notably in 1848, when a barrow at Crakelow was opened to disclose human bones and a fine Bronze Age earthenware urn, now in the Weston Park Museum at Sheffield. Some years later, in 1863, another barrow was opened at Boar’s Low (designated Rose Low on present-day Ordnance Sheets), which was found to contain two separate interments. The first to be discovered was an Anglo-Saxon burial, but further excavation showed that this had been made on top of much earlier Celtic remains. The Saxon burial contained a fine sword, some 34 inches long, together with the central boss of a shield, the remainder of which had disintegrated.
In the Domesday Survey carried out after the Norman Conquest and published in 1086, Tissington is listed among the possessions of Henry de Ferrers.
From the great Ferrers family, the estate passed to the Savage family in the time of Henry I, William le Savage the last male heir, dying in 1259. Two co-heiresses of Savage brought the manor in moieties to the families of Meynell and Edensor.
In the Meynell family, the estate passed down the generations to Joan Meynell, who carried it to her second husband, Sir Thomas Clynton, whose only daughter and heiress, Anne, married Robert Franceys of Foremark. Again there was an only daughter Cicely, who inherited the estate and who married Nicholas FitzHerbert of Somersall. Thus it was that half of the manor of Tissington came into the FitzHerbert family through a chain of heiresses of Savage, Meynell, Clynton and Franceys.
In the meantime, the other moiety of the estate passed by marriage from the Edensor family to the Harthills, and from thence to the Cokaynes, from whence, in the reign of Elizabeth I, Francis FitzHerbert, who was the great grandson of Nicholas, purchased it and so the Manor of Tissington became re-united.
Since that time, the history of the village has been inextricably woven with that of the FitzHerbert family, who still occupy the Hall and govern an estate extending from Bradbourne Mill in the east, to the river Dove in the West.
This text is taken from A Short History of Tissington and its Parish Church, by D. H. Buckley, 1966