Venue: Glyndebourne
Town: Glynde, GB

Glyndebourne is an English country house, the site of an opera house that, since 1934, has been the venue for the annual Glyndebourne Festival Opera. The house, near Lewes in East Sussex, is thought to be about six hundred years old and is listed at Grade II. "There had been a manor house at Glynde Bourne (as it was often spelt) since the fifteenth century", but the exact age of the house is unknown. Some surviving timber framing and pre-Elizabethan panelling makes an early 16th-century date the most likely. In 1618, it came into the possession of the Hay family, passing to James Hay Langham in 1824. He inherited his father's baronetcy and estate in Northamptonshire in 1833 which under the terms of his inheritance should have led to him relinquishing Glyndebourne, but as a certified lunatic he was unable to do so. After litigation the estate passed to a relative, Langham Christie, but he later had to pay £50,000 to persuade another relative to withdraw a rival claim. Langham Christie's son, William Langham Christie, made substantial alterations to the house in the 1870s. First, a brick extension hid its 17th-century façade, while ornate stonework and balustrading was added. Then, in 1876, the architect Ewan Christian was engaged to install bay windows and add decorative brickwork to give the house the Jacobethan appearance which can still be seen from the gardens today. Some of the exterior of the older parts of the house can be seen from the driveway next to the theatre. Langham Christie was the son of one Daniel Christin, a Swiss of obscure origins who anglicised his name to Christie on entering the army of the East India Company. According to frequently published accounts, Daniel Christin joined the Bombay Engineers, rising to the rank of major, and the family fortune was made when he was given a hoard of gems by a Sultan in thanks for Christin preventing his troops from pillaging a harem. Unfortunately, none of these claims finds ready support in the records of