THORNHAM HALL, PREVIOUSLY CALLED MAJOR HOUSE, STOOD IN THE VILLAGE OF THORNHAM MAGNA, three miles south-west of Eye. Before being acquired by John Major, a Yorkshireman by descent who was created a baronet in 1765 and who also owned Worlingworth and other properties in Suffolk, Thornham had been the property of the Briseworth, Wiseman and Bokenham families before passing by marriage to the Killigrew family in 1681. On Sir John Major's death in 1781 his baronetcy passed to John Henniker, the husband of his elder daughter Anne. Thornham was inherited by his younger daughter, who married the second Duke of Chandos, and on her death without children it was inherited by the Henniker family. Sir John Henniker, the son of a Russia merchant, was created a baron in the peerage of Ireland in 1800.

THE HOUSE that Sir John Major bought was a Tudor rectagular U-shaped moated house typical of its period with pedimented windows on the ground floor, a central projecting double-storey entrance porch surmounted by a steeple or cupola in the centre of the cross-wing and polygonal turrets at the angles. It was recased in the seventeenth century, the porch and polygonal turrets being removed, a clock and bell tower built at the centre of the ridge of the cross-wing roof and the original fenestration replaced by sashed windows. A plan of the house before its nineteenth-century transformation shows what must have been the great hall divided by a partition into a dining room and library, with a screens passage and the left-hand wing devoted to domestic offices. The other wing contained an ante room and the drawing room. Substantial additions, including a staircase hall, had been built to the rear of the cross-wing. The house of the second Lord Henniker and his nephew who succeeded him remained basically a Tudor house altered to accommodate new styles of living in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

On inheriting the house on the death of his father in 1832, the fourth Lord Henniker commissioned J. P. Deering to produce plans to extend and modernise it. Deering’s proposals involved rebuilding parts of the house in the Regency style espoused by his contemporary, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, but this scheme was not adopted. Whether this was because it was not to his client’s taste or because Deering was gradually giving up his architectural practice is not known.