The Lord Mayor and Gidea Hall

Jean de Ross's daughter Ena turned her back on the “Scots Wha’ Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled” business and married an Englishman, Harold Cooke.

Harold Cooke’s (born 1345) family lived in the City of London before the Norman Conquest, so they were likely a Celtic-Saxon mixture.  Sometime before 1106 William Daniel Cooke moved out to Leicester’s countryside. At this point the Cooke men married women with decent but unpretentious last names like Hook, Miles and Auscomb.  

The names of Harold Cooke’s father and grandfather have been lost altogether, but they definitely were offspring of the earlier Cookes, who were what Jane Austen would term “gentry”. Ena, the granddaughter of the Fourth Mormaer of Ross, wouldn’t have forsaken her glorious if bloody heritage to grovel in a hovel with a peasant. She may have been young and in love and all that rot, but she was still a patrician, and her aunt was a Queen Consort.

The connection with Ena de Ros and her family had a salubrious effect on the Cooke fortunes. One of Ena and Harold’s sons became Sir Norman. Sir Norman’s grandson Thomas (born 1422) was a successful draper (he wasn’t an interior decorator; “drapers” dealt in cloth and all sorts of dry goods) who had his own merchant ship, owned numerous lucrative parcels of real estate, and was the Lord Mayor of London. He made the mistake of involving himself in the War of the Roses by lending money to the beleaguered Queen Margaret, and so was imprisoned for a while. The victorious Edward IV fined, released, then re-imprisoned, re-fined, and re-released him; fortunately Sir Thomas wasn’t high enough on the Royal Enemies List to merit more lethal vengeance.

Sir Thomas’s greatest contribution to his family was in purchasing an old London manor house called Gidea (pronounced “giddy”) Hall, built before 1250. In 1466 he was granted a license to “crenellate” his house, which meant to fortify it. It took two years, and excavating an actual moat, for Sir Thomas to be satisfied. The estate consisted of a main manor house with two adjacent wings forming three sides of a courtyard. There was an open colonnade on the fourth side, and a number of outbuildings completed the property.

Succeeding generations of Cookes loved this grand establishment. Sir Phillip Cooke was born there in 1454, as was his son Sir John in 1473.

Gidea Hall in 1908. Source: http://jaysteeleblog.wordpress.com/