The Ribston Pippin is an old variety of apple, originating at Ribston Hall in the North Riding of Yorkshire, probably from French seeds sent to Sir Henry Goodricke (1642–1705), who admired French architecture as well as French apples. Having enjoyed a remarkably successful career as soldier and diplomat in volatile times, when he succeeded to the baronetcy in 1670 Sir Henry built himself a grand house in a French style, which still sits high on a bend in the River Nidd, rather less of it than appears in the Kipp engraving of c.1707, and lacking its original fortified garden wall, but a handsome and elegant establishment nevertheless. By then Ribston, earlier ‘Ripestane’, already had a long and colourful past. It once marked the river crossing point of the Great North Road, and in the twelfth century those great protectors of important byways, the Knights Templar, established a place of refuge and respite there, of which only the austerely beautiful chapel remains, now attached to the house itself. It is the coldest as well as the oldest part of the house, and young Edward Dent often bitterly complained of its penetrating cold when forced to work in the room next to it. A lifelong aversion to damp and to institutionalised religion probably began at home.

Ribston was never home to the aristocracy; rather, throughout its long history it fostered under its various roofs a succession of landed gentry, the upwardly mobile middle classes who formed the bedrock of establishment England: bishops, diplomats, politicians, merchants, soldiers, less creative than acute and certainly strongminded. The Dent family are only the most recent of these to take over house and estate, arriving there in 1834, just before Victoria came to the throne, and quietly, unobtrusively, they began take a hand in county affairs.

It was Dent's solid ‘late Victorian’ background, as he described it, which gave him both the built-in confidence of his class and the foundations for a lifelong rebellion against it. He used it, wore its protective mantle unconsciously and spent his life undermining its certainties.