Take care when making your entrance into the Parlour for a little step at the doorway may take you by surprise.

Immediately on your left is a neat little Georgian alcove that will have been installed during Sterne’s occupancy. The panelling on all four walls is again oak but there are more than two varieties of sizes, an indication that some parts of the interior may have been recycled from another house in the village.

Laurence Sterne called this room his ‘best room’ and it contains one piece of furniture, a little table, that belonged to him. It was donated to the museum by Miss Coleman of Helmsley, who, when she heard Shandy Hall was becoming a museum, wanted the table to ‘return home’.

Most of the paintings and prints on display show scenes from A Sentimental Journey: two stipple engravings by Angelica Kauffmann; The Beautiful Grisette by William Powell Frith; a copy of a painting by Gilbert Stuart Newton entitled Yorick and the Grisette; and an engraving from the original by James Northcote which shows Yorick feeling the compliant shop assistant’s pulse, with her husband doffing his cap as he passes through the room.

Next to the cupboard and behind a hinged section of panelling, is a remarkable wall-painting which dates from c 1430 and shows a monogram (or Christogram – IHS) that forms an abbreviation for the name of Jesus Christ. The traditional painted symbol has been laid directly onto the horse-hair and clay surface (wattle and daub) and around it a vine, with grapes attached, is growing. These make reference to the text from St. John: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches’. Walking across the room you can pass through the opening of what was once the original medieval wall and enter the tiny 18th-century extension, added by Sterne to modernise his home.