Ayscoughfee Hall

The house, currently a museum, was built for a local wool merchant, traditionally supposed to be Richard Ailwyn (or Aldwyn) in the fifteenth century. A dendrological study of the roof timbers reveal that the house was built in one phase, with a completion date of the majority of the present building in 1451. Richard Ailwyn's son, Sir Nicholas Ailwyn, a member of the Mercers' Company, became Lord Mayor of London in 1499. In the seventeenth century, the Hall passed into the Johnson family. The most notable Johnson was the second Maurice Johnson, known as "the Antiquary" (1688–1755), who founded the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (the second oldest antiquarian society still in existence) in…