The south door of the great hall
The doorway on the south side of the great hall opens onto the southern courtyard. It is the door the household would have used to reach the service yard, and it carries the arms of the family that held the manor from the end of the sixteenth century.
The southern courtyard the door opens onto, with the ranges that enclose it. The doorway itself and the arms above it are not visible at this distance.
Above the doorway is the Hickman coat of arms. The emblem is a Talbot, the heavy hunting dog that appears in a good deal of English heraldry, and in that context it stands for faithfulness. The family motto, Toujours Fidèle, translates as "always faithful", so the device and the words are saying the same thing twice, a common enough arrangement in a scheme meant to be read at a glance from the courtyard.
The Hickmans bought the manor in 1596. Placing their arms over a doorway of the older building was the ordinary way for an incoming family to mark a house as theirs without altering its fabric, and it is one of the few Hickman interventions that is visible from outside.
Related pages: the buttery and the room-by-room views.
Reading a coat of arms over a door
Heraldry on a doorway is a legal statement as much as a decorative one. Arms were granted to an individual and descended by strict rules, so a shield over an entrance identifies not just a family but a particular line within it, and often a particular marriage. Placing them at the point where a visitor passes from public ground into private is the whole purpose: the door is where ownership has to be asserted.
The Talbot is one of the more common charges in English arms and one of the easier to recognise, a heavy hound with drooping ears and a broad muzzle, always shown in profile. Its meaning in heraldic convention is the loyalty of a hunting dog, and it is used by families whose mottoes make the same claim in words. Doubling the message this way was normal practice rather than redundancy: the device could be read at distance by people who could not read the motto at all.
Where the door sits in the plan
The south doorway belongs to the service side of the building. A great hall of this period has two ends and they are not interchangeable: the upper end, with the dais and the family's chambers beyond it, and the lower end, where the screens passage separates the hall from the pantry, the buttery and the route to the kitchen. Doors at the lower end are working doors.
That is why the courtyard beyond it matters. Fuel, water, brewing, laundry and the movement of supplies all happened outside, and the south courtyard was the yard those activities used. A doorway here would have been in near-constant use by staff, and almost never by guests, who arrived at the other end of the building entirely.
Questions about the Hickman doorway
What is a Talbot?
An extinct breed of white hunting hound, and one of the standard beasts of English heraldry. In arms it is shown in profile with hanging ears and signifies faithfulness.
Why are the Hickman arms on a building the family did not build?
Because they bought it. Adding arms to an existing doorway was the standard, inexpensive way for an incoming owner to mark a house as theirs without altering its fabric.
When did the Hickmans acquire the manor?
In 1596. The family held it for nearly four centuries, until Sir Edmund Bacon gave the hall to the nation in 1970.
Is the doorway itself original?
The opening belongs to the medieval building; the heraldic display above it is a later addition, which is the usual pattern for arms of a family that arrived a century after construction.