Sir John H. Thorold (1773-1831)

John Hayford Thorold was the eldest son of Sir John Thorold, 9th baronet, and Jane Hayford. The Thorolds were a well-established family of Lincolnshire landowners and from 1775 their seat had been at Syston Hall near Grantham. Sir John Hayford Thorold succeeded his father as 10th baronet in 1815. He had married Mary Kent in 1811 and they had one son, John Charles. Mary died in 1829 and Thorold remarried in 1830. His second wife was also named Mary and was the widow of John Dalton. The 10th baronet died in 1831.

The 9th baronet had been one of the leading figures in the mania for book-collecting that marked the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, and assembled a fine library focussed on printed books from the 15th and early 16th centuries. The 10th baronet - Sir John Hayford Thorold - continued with this passion and spent large sums of money on many further acquisitions. In the early 1820s he commissioned Lewis Vulliamy to build a new library at Syston Hall to house the collection.

In 1884 a significant part of the collection, including most of the early printed books, was sold at auction by Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge. Cicero’s De oratore, now owned by Leeds University Library, is listed as no.566 in the sale catalogue. A further sale took place in 1923, shortly after which Syston Park was demolished.