BARTON HALL, SITUATED FOUR MILES NORTH-EAST OF BURY ST EDMUNDS in the village of Great Barton, was one of the six country houses in Suffolk which were destroyed by fire in the twentieth century and not rebuilt.

The manor of Great Barton belonged to the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in medieval times and at the Dissolution of the Monasteries was granted to Sir Thomas Kytson. In 1553 it was in the hands of John, Duke of Northumberland, Lord President of the Council in King Edward VI's reign, who exchanged it for the manor of Drayton Bassett, a Staffordshire property of Sir Thomas Aud(e)ley.

Barton belonged to the Audley family until 1706 when it was sold to Thomas Folkes, a lawyer from Bury St Edmunds. Through the marriage in 1724 of Folkes's daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, to Sir Thomas Hanmer (she was his second wife) Barton Hall and its estate passed in 1746 to the Bunbury family. Sir Thomas Hanmer, Speaker of the House of Commons in the reigns of Queen Anne and King George I, had no children and left his estates at Mildenhall, which he had inherited from his mother, and Barton to his nephew the Reverend Sir William Bunbury. It remained one of the Bunbury family seats until its destruction in 1914.

Sir William's son Charles bred the horse Diomed, winner of the first Derby Race in 1780. His brother was the celebrated painter and caricaturist Henry William Bunbury many of whose drawings adorned the walls of Barton before the fire and whose son, Lieutenant General Sir Edward Henry Bunbury, inherited the house on Sir Charles's death in 1821. Sir Edward married a member of the family of the famous eighteenth-century radical politician Charles James Fox and, in the course of a distinguished army career, was charged with accompanying Napoleon to St Helena. The Bunbury family were considerable collectors of paintings, the artists represented in the collection including Reynolds, Van Dyck, Veronese, Correggio, Rubens, Lely, Kneller and Rembrandt. Its library had a valuable collection of books including those inherited from Sir Thomas Hanmer.

ROBERT AUDLEY, who died in 1624, is thought to have built the original house either in late Elizabethan or early Jacobean times. It was presumably similar to other Suffolk houses of this era but underwent considerable alterations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.