NOSTALGIA: The strange riddle of Richard Fountaine’s almshouse at Linton

Craven has its fair share of curious buildings but few can match the famous Fountaine Hospital Almshouse which sits at the south end of the village green at Linton, near Grassington. What on earth, folk ask, is a glorious Baroque pile like that, all Doric pilasters, urns and cupolas, doing sitting cheek by jowl with the yeoman’s farmhouses and humble cottages of one of the Dales’ picture-postcard hamlets? The strange juxtaposition doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.

Intrigued, Jane Houlton and her late husband Michael Devenish went to great lengths to unscramble that conundrum and the result is a piece of detective work which will captivate anyone with an interest in Wharfedale and its environs. Their researches, focusing on the enigmatic Richard Fountaine (1639-1722), the benefactor who bequeathed the almshouse, reveal a fascinating tale of secret marriages and bitter lawsuits in the cut and thrust world of commerce in seventeenth century England.

Now Jane has written all this into a book, An Almshouse for Linton, which clears up some of the myths and sets out clearly what the building’s history is. And, more than that, it offers evidence towards solving a long-standing architectural riddle: which architect designed the Fountaine Hospital Almshouse? After all, for a building of such outstanding architectural merit, such illustrious names as Wren, Hawkmoor and Vanbrugh have always been in the running. But disentangling truth from myth has been something of a problem.

Most of the myths surrounding the almshouse and its creator originated with the romantic writer Halliwell Sutcliffe, author of the highly fanciful The Striding Dales (1929). Readers of the Herald might well remember W R Mitchell gently dismantling Sutcliffe’s claims to be a true historian in an article in these pages in 2010. Sutcliffe propagated the notion that Richard Fountaine was a timber merchant who made his money selling coffins in the Plague years. This is untrue; Fountaine was a humble son of Linton who probably was educated at Burnsall before heading to London where he made his fortune as a haberdasher in the City.

Fountaine saw history being made, living through the hardships of the Civil War and the heady days of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. He married, had four children (none of whom survived), retired to Enfield, Middlesex from St Lawrence Lane in the City, and was a thoroughly respected figure among the rich merchants of the City of London. But, unlike many of them, he never forgot his origins – his will made that clear. But if the wealthy City gent imagined that after his demise his last wishes would be warmly greeted back in his native Yorkshire, he was very wrong.

The fact that Richard Fountaine had left a substantial bequest of £650 (plus a share of the residue of his estate) to one Christian Fountaine, a woman who was no relative either by blood or by marriage, caused outrage. Christian was Richard’s carer, it seems, and was included, as the will put it, “in recompense to her great care of me and my wife”. Perhaps Christian had been an orphan and had been granted the Fountaine name. The Linton heirs were incensed to learn that Christian had later married an apothecary, Benjamin Stephens, in conspicuous disregard of the conditions of the will. Only a ruling from the Court of Chancery in 1725 placated the outcry and established Christian’s right to marry.

Other bequests included the building of the almshouse in Linton. Of course, had Richard Fountaine not elected to be so extravagant in his generosity, the estate residue would have been divided among the Fountaine legatees back in the Dales. Hence all hell broke loose in the law courts for several years, with Fountaine’s executors finding themselves the objects of considerable animosity and suspicion from some of the folks back in Linton. In court documents it was alleged that much had been purloined from Fountaine’s estate, including “Severall Diamonds Pearls and Necklaces of Pearls and Severall Rings, Baubles, Locketts sett with Diamonds and Sapphires Rubies Amethysts and other precious stones”. The scandal no doubt echoed through villages and hamlets right across the Dales and beyond.

Unfortunately, the chief executor John Colton, who had been given the task of commissioning Linton’s almshouse, died in 1724, throwing the commission into confusion. Jane Houlton’s book is fascinating on this subject, identifying the strange break in the design of the Fountaine almshouse – with the ornate Baroque facade giving way to a strangely incongruous, almost rustic rear – as representing the loss of continuity which Colton’s death caused. So the dazzling masterpiece which so impresses those who look on it from the green is more like a facade, a kind of stage-set. Surely Richard Fountaine could not have wished it to be so.

Much more likely is the supposition that Richard Fountaine saw himself in the long tradition of generous benefactors produced by the Dales. He has much in common with Sir William Craven, a son of Appletreewick who went to London ninety years before Fountaine did and became Lord Mayor. Craven repaired the bridge and church at Burnsall and founded and endowed the school there. Our area is littered with similar examples. Ferrand Spence built Spence’s almshouse in 1698, still gracing the village of Carleton today. Silverster Petyt, born at Storiths in 1638, left a bequest which eventually became today’s Boyle and Petyt School at Beamsley, and endowed the Petyt Library.

As the book makes clear, Fountaine’s almshouse was unique in the amount of controversy it generated. The Fountaine family heirs did not carry out their duties properly in the years that followed. As T D Whitaker in his famous History of Craven states: “The worst of all trustees are founder’s kin; who generally conceiving themselves to be robbed by the foundation itself, have few scruples to restrain them from robbing the trust in return, to reimburse their own families.” In such circumstances it is not surprising that the almshouse has had a chequered history, with most of the documentation relating to its construction having mysteriously vanished at some unknown point.

Therefore it is all the more remarkable that Jane Houlton has produced such a carefully researched and well balanced work. As for who the architect was – well, the facts are marshalled and a conclusion is reached. But the building will always remain as something of a riddle. But it is a riddle that has produced a fascinating tale which spans four centuries of history in this unassuming corner of the Dales.

An Almshouse for Linton by Jane Houlton (Devenish Press 2018) is available from Skipton Tourist Information Centre, Yorkshire Dales National Park Centres, bookshops in Grassington, or online from: bit.ly/RichardFountaine.