Sir William Strickland and his brother George were sons of Sir George Strickland, a Yorkshire agriculturist who introduced new methods of crop rotation and farm machinery. Their father was also a patron of the artist Arthur Devis and of William Kent, who remodelled much of the interior of Boynton Hall, and remade many of the earlier fire surrounds in the Paladian style during the 1730s. John Carr of York was also employed as an architect and made further alterations to the family seat 1765 - 1780.
William, the eldest son, was a keen naturalist and honorary member of the British board of Agriculture. He established his own farm at Welburn in Yorkshire before succeeding his father as 6th Baron of Boynton in 1808. He toured America in 1794 and 1795 sketching scenic landmarks and collecting information on American farming practices for the Board which he later used as the basis for a critical assessment: ‘Observations on the Agriculture of the U.S.A.’, London, 1801. During his visit to Monticello in May 1795 Thomas Jefferson gave him drawings and a small model of his mouldboard plough which Strickland praised as an invention ‘formed upon the truest and most mechanical principal of any I had seen’ The subsequent correspondence between them was marked by exchanges of publications, seeds and information on agriculture and natural history and continued until 1805.