After the Dissolution
After the inmates were expelled, all the valuables, jewels, altar plate, bells and
so on were removed for the crown and all the furniture and fittings sold. Farm stock
and tools plus timber and lead would also be sold to the highest bidder and the
walls left to perish in the weather or be sold as building materials.
Four years later in 1539, St Katherine's Priory was granted to Charles Brandon the
Duke of Suffolk and the King's brother in law who was once married to Mary Tudor.
In 1540, Brandon obtained permission to sell it to Vincent Grantham and his son
Thomas, members of a family with a prominent position in Lincoln. The family built
themselves a magnificent mansion known as St Katherine's Hall, adjacent to the ruins
of the priory.
In 1617, James I stayed at St Katherine's Hall as the guest of Sir Thomas Grantham
for several days. Sir Thomas was described as ' a gentleman of great repute in his
country who kept up all his life the old hospitality of England, having a great
retinue and a noble table, and a resort of all the nobility and gentry of those
parts'' he died in 1630.
James I.
The Grantham family sold St Katherine's Hall to Francis Manby who lived there until
his death in 1699. The estate passed to his nephew Sir Thomas Manby but the family
had estates elsewhere and did not reside at St Katherine's. The hall became neglected
and rapidly fell into disrepair.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the building was described as ‘four or
five storeys high, built of wrought stone, with mullioned windows, the roof either
flat or guttered around. The chief staircase was very spacious, of timber and square.
The stables were large and stately. A pair of gates opened to the road near the
forking of the Newark and Sleaford roads...'
By the nineteenth century, no visible signs of the priory or hall remained and the
area was about to undergo a new phase of development.