Pedigree of Savile of Methley Hall
During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century gentlemen and wealthy clothiers in the Halifax district created a unique style of domestic building. Though their gabled halls were arranged in a traditional manner, the decorative details applied to the exteriors were amazing in their virtuosity. An influential prototype was the (demolished) Methley Hall, a fifteenth-century structure enlarged between 1588 and 1611 by Sir John Savile and his son, Sir Henry. Sir John was a founder member of the Society of Antiquaries and a friend of William Camden, (1605); his youngest brother, Thomas, also had a considerable reputation as an authority on British antiquities. It was therefore natural for the Saviles to favour elements taken from Gothic architecture as well as classical forms. Methley was the first house in the West Riding to have an enormous hall window divided by numerous mullions and transoms. The master masons responsible for the building were probably those members of the Akroyd family whose names appear in the contemporary Methley parish register. John, Abraham and Martin Akroyd also erected the first West Riding buildings to have distinctive windows shaped like a rose or a Catherine-wheel. The original source of inspiration for these may have been Robert Smythson, the great Elizabethan architect, who in 1599 designed a circular window divided into twelve lights.
William Wilkinson, of Astley, married Jennet,a widow, daughter of Henry Savile, in Halifax in 1610.
Source:Visitation of Yorkshire, Sir.William Dugdale, A.D. 1665 and 1666