A medieval legacy
Age and beauty combine at two ancient manors and a hall house
BRITAIN’S oldest inhabited houses are lasting monuments, both to the skill and ingenuity of the craftsmen who built them and to the life and times of the owners who lived in them, as the history of three houses of medieval origin currently on the market clearly shows.
For sale through Savills (01732 789700) at a guide price of £4.25 million, The Old Palace at Wrotham, near Sevenoaks, Kent, was one of several ancient manors owned by the Archbishops of Canterbury that lined the ‘Archbishops’ Trail’ from Canterbury to Lambeth. Although the exact date of its construction is unknown, reliable sources, which include the Domesday Book, indicate that the palace was granted to Christ Church, Canterbury, by the Anglo-saxon King Ethelstan in the year 964.
According to Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (1798), ‘the archbishops had very antiently a palace here, in which they frequently resided till the time of Archbishop Simon Islip, who came to the see in 1349 and, having a desire to finish the palace at Maidstone which John Offord his predecessor had begun… pulled down the greatest part of this house and transported the materials thither’.
The ruins and surviving buildings remained in the hands of the archbishops until 1538, when Thomas Cranmer returned them to the Crown. During the brief reign of Henry’s son and successor, Edward VI, the site of the former palace and the park of Wrotham were granted to Sir John Mason, who sold the estate to Robert Byng in 1556. The Byng family restored the remaining buildings, which included a large, substantial stone
building—thought to be the former kitchen wing of the old palace—as a manor house with gardens.
According to Hasted, following the execution of Charles I in 1639, John Byng sold the manor of Wrotham to William James, the owner of the adjoining Ightham Court estate, who was ‘a man much trusted in the usurpation under Oliver Cromwell, as one of the committee members for the sequestration of loyalist estates during which time he was in five years thrice chosen knight of the shire for Kent’. The James family owned the manor at Wrotham until the early 20th century.
The Old Palace, listed Grade II*, is located in Bull Lane in the heart of Wrotham village, where the Bull Hotel was originally part of the manor’s stable complex. Set in more than two acres of established gardens and grounds that include a splendid magnolia and some majestic trees, the beautifully proportioned manor house comes with a two-bedroom annexe, six-bay garaging, and a four-acre paddock and field with separate road access.
The main house offers 5,985sq ft of versatile family accommodation on three floors, with a spa on the lower-ground floor comprising a steam room, shower and a large heated swimming pool. Comprehensively refurbished in recent years, it combines an interesting mix of period and contemporary elements, including high ceilings, exposed timbers and stone mullion windows, aligned with groundsource heating, a home automation system, programmable lighting, a bright and cheerful Smallbone fitted kitchen and bathroom suites by Villeroy & Boch.
The drawing room, sitting room and family room all have feature fireplaces with wood- or coal-burning stoves; the dualaspect games room has a fitted media cupboard on one wall. The first floor houses a stylish principal bedroom suite overlooking the gardens plus three further bedrooms, two with bathrooms en suite. The second floor is accessed by two separate staircases, one leading to two further bedrooms and an adjoining bathroom, and the other to a large seventh bedroom, a storage room and a further room currently used as a cinema.
Across the Thames in north Essex, Paddy Pritchard-gordon of Knight Frank in Bishop’s Stortford (01279 213343) quotes a guide price of £2.9m for Grade II*listed Prior’s Hall at Stebbing, four miles from Great Dunmow and 12 miles from Bishop’s Stortford, which was one of three manors in the parish of Lindsell administered as a single unit since before the Norman Conquest.
Prior’s Hall takes its name from the Priory of St Valery-sur-somme in Picardy, to which it was granted by a grateful William I for the ‘spiritual help’ its Benedictine monks provided in the form of prayers to reverse an
Sources indicate that the palace was granted to Christ Church by King Ethelstan
unfavourable wind for sailing during his conquest of England in 1066.
A History of the County of Essex (1907) recounts that ‘when the Norman fleet was prepared for the invasion in 1066, it lay for a fortnight at the mouth of the Somme waiting for a favourable wind. Prayers were offered up at the abbey of St Valery, and at last the monks brought out in solemn procession the shrine containing the body of the saint. The blowing of the south wind on Wednesday, 27 September, was piously ascribed to this, and there can be no doubt that the grants made to the abbey in England, whether by the Conqueror or others, were intended as a thanks-offering’.
In those days, tithes and fees were paid to asset-owners, and lands in foreign ownership became an increasing drain on the English economy. In 1377, Edward III confiscated Prior’s Hall and gave it to William of Wykeham, who was Lord Chancellor of England and Bishop of Winchester. In 1379, he founded New College, Oxford, and endowed it with Prior’s Hall and other manorial properties as a source of revenue and timber for construction. The land belonging to Prior’s Hall was sold by New College in 1923.
The hall itself stands in 10¾ acres of gardens, grounds and pasture and comes with stabling, stores and extensive outbuildings, including a massive timber-frame barn, listed Grade II. One of the finest surviving medieval barns in the east of England, Prior’s Hall Barn was built of some 900 separate pieces of unseasoned oak felled between 1417 and 1442, to store the produce of New College’s Essex estates.
According to RIBA, Prior’s Hall, previously known as Parsonage Farm, is a good example of a timber-frame house with wattle-and-daub infilling, built in about 1400 and rebuilt some 200 years later. The rear range, originally a separate late-15th-century building, was incorporated into the main building in the 20th century. The eightbedroom house boasts some fine reception rooms, including a drawing room, dining room, sitting room and snooker room, all full of historic character and charm, together with a large kitchen/breakfast room that leads to the conservatory and on to the indoor swimming pool.
Across the county border in Suffolk, Sudbury-based conservation architect John Hyett, who trained with the late Sir William Whitfield and has been involved in the restoration of some of England’s most iconic buildings, is selling the 15th-century former hall house that has been his and his wife Carol’s much-cherished home since 1993, at a guide price of £650,000 through Bedfords in Bury St Edmunds (01284 769999). Small, but perfectly formed, Thatches, which is listed Grade II, is one of a handful of ancient thatched cottages in the pleasant small village of Ashen, a former farming settlement, the population of which has only about doubled since Domesday.
Constructed from timbers imported from Silesia in about 1450—a fact confirmed by an expert colleague—thatches was built on a north-south axis that allows the east-west sunlight to stream through the house, which offers versatile accommodation on two floors including a sitting room, dining room, snug/library, kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom and garage/workshop. Gardens to the front and rear are designed both for privacy and to enjoy the sunshine at various times of the day.
Prior’s Hall Barn was built of some 900 separate pieces of unseasoned oak