TWO LOST COURT LODGES - LONGFIELD AND WOOTTON
By A. BAKER, A.R.I.B.A., and S. E. RIGOLD, M.A., F.S.A.
The designation ‘Court’, or ‘Court Lodge’, of such a high proportion of Kentish manor-houses often denotes an origin among the endowments of one of the great religious houses, or among episcopal temporalities. This is but one of the reasons why they often conceal remains of medieval stone buildings, and in particular of the specialized plans required by the clergy. Longfield Court (TQ603690) and Wootton Court (TR225466) have both been utterly demolished since the last war, and, apart from a hard-to-come-by note on Longfield, neither has been described in print in any modern fashion—even Sir Charles Igglesden’s Saunter never took him to their small and secluded parishes. Nor was any notice given for an adequate survey before demolition since neither house had any statutory ‘listing’. The accounts that follow are based on salvaged information.
LONGFIELD COURT
Longfield was an ancient possession of St. Andrew of Rochester, a ‘dog-legged’ feld or clearing, 3½ miles long and ½ mile wide. At the time of Domesday, it had been assigned to the Bishop and was held of him by Anschitil the priest who, at least by 1107—8, was his Archdeacon.1 Thereafter, the Bishop regularly granted it to the Archdeacon,2 and this arrangement persisted until the learned Archdeacon Plume, founder of the Plume Library at Maldon, Essex, was buried at Longfield in 1704. Presumably all these Archdeacons lived, on occasion, at Longfield Court, but when Harris wrote in 1719, he called it a ‘farmhouse’, albeit a massive one,3 and thanks to this reduced status it escaped rebuilding in the eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century the Ecclesiastical Commissioners disposed of it.4
1 Domesday, f. 5b; Registr. Hamonis Hethe, 433. 2 Cf. the similar tenure of Lympne by the Archdeacon of Canterbury.
3 J. Harris, The History of Kent (1719), 187. 4 After 1836, but several changes of ownership before 1908.
In the 1950s both authors had noticed the medieval fiintwork appearing through the dense covering of ivy and creepers, though little detail was visible other than Victorian. The house appeared to comprise two attached ranges with gables at the north. In 1908, when it was less overgrown externally but already much disguised inside, it had been explored by C. E. Lovell who published a brief account, with drawings of details but no plan, in the short-lived Architectural and Topographical Record.5 In March, 1962, we learned that it was being demolished to make way for more of the housing that has turned Longfield, in a surprisingly short time, from a tiny village into a singularly charmless little dormitory-town. We went at once to take what records we could, but of the eastern of the two apparent ranges only a fragment of the east wall, with a flint quoin at the south-east, remained, and of the west range only the west wall stood to plate level, the others being already reduced to shoulder-level or lower. Among the pile of rubble were few ashlar details, but quite a number of oak timbers, from which an attempt has been made to reconstruct the roof of the west range. There were also a few timbers with heavy deposits of soot consistent with their having at some time covered an open hearth. By June, 1962, not a trace of the building remained and its site was covered by a road.
The walling was of field flints; the quoins and the surrounds of the doors and windows were of ragstone, in long slabs, well-dressed and generally in fair condition. Lovell called the openings ‘thirteenth- and fourteenth-century’, and mistook an upper doorway (E) for a lancet. As far as we could see them, the dressings were in fact all of one, early Perpendicular period, with neat hollow-chamfers and brooch or pyramid stops (Fig. 1, P), from the late fourteenth century or a little afterwards and there was no positive evidence that the medieval fabric of the house was other than one build.
Lovell records that the medieval stonework and rafter-ends were visible all along the west and south sides. The west range was certainly a unitary stone building, 45 by 25 ft. externally, roofed north to south, with a gable at the north, hipped at the south and of two storeys from the beginning. But of the apparent east range only the southern part was medieval—its termination in the west wall is clear in the only known photograph of the exterior. The original plan was thus L-~haped, and the south-eastern part was roofed east to west. At an unknown later date the re-entrant was filled in and covered by a gable, rather higher than the other, and likewise facing north, thus producing a nearly square ensemble. The entrance, with a Victorian porch, was in this addition, beside the north-east angle of the west range; it led, as Lovell records, to a passage right through the house, flanked on the right (west) side by five medieval arched doorways, one of which had been blocked.
The west range comprised a spacious Great Chamber, or Solar, with service-rooms and another room (X) beside them on the ground floor: the south-east quarter included a Hall, of which the further part of the passage seen by Lovell was the screens-passage. There was, however,
5
The Architectural and Topographical Record. London, I. 1908, 317-19.no trace of stone entrance doors to the passage nor of any bonding of the north and south walls to the west range. These walls may have been, at least in part, timber-framed, and subsequently rebuilt in mixed materials, but the east wall was of flint and almost certainly of the same character as the west range. It contained a blocked opening, probably a door, and a low two-light window.
This window (F), drawn by Lovell (see Fig. 2) and recovered in fragments, was clearly of the same period as the rest of ragstone detail and, to all appearance, in situ, indicating that, at the period in question, the Hall was short and confined to the ground floor. It will be shown that this is consistent with the appointments of the west range, though it is possible that something remained of an earlier open Hall, as the soot-caked timbers might suggest.
The external details preserved in the west range were: on the north, a plinth, returned a short way round the east; on the west, a broad chimney-breast, beyond which the plinth ceased, and an arched doorway (A, see Fig. 2), rescued intact. This contained its original door-leaf of vertical lap-boards with ledges, though it had been reversed. In the south wall, which had no plinth, a two-light cusped window, with shutter-rebates but no glazing-groove (B), had already been broken down but its position is almost certain. Internally, four adjacent arched doors, with hollow chambers and brooch-stops (as Fig. 1, P), gave on to the hall from the west range. The widest of these doors, opposite the door (A) in the west wall, indicated a kitchen-passage; the southernmost door probably led to a stairway to the chamber, leaving window (B) to light one of the two flanking service-rooms. The western windows were formed, or enlarged, later. The partition-walls must have been timber-framed, but the boundary between the service and the northern room (X) is suggested by a cellar under the latter, apparently contemporary and lit by a cellar-light (C) beside the chimney-breast and at least one on the north front (C). The fifth door in the extended screens-passage (D) did not lead from the Hall but possibly from an attached pentice. It formed the entrance to room X which had no communication with any other part of the house, and was probably an independent lodging for a subordinate, rather than a store-room. The remaining jamb of its fireplace did not look original.
The floor of the Great Chamber or Solar was carried on heavy chamfered beams, presumably framed into girder-beams on the side wall, carried not on offsets but on corbels. There was no trace of any sub-division on the first floor, though a chamber of this size is likely to have had a framed partition. All the windows had been altered beyond recognition and relinecl in brick, but Lovell records traces of a Gothic window-head in the north gable. The absence of any traces of windowseats, usually a durable feature, confirms that the range was of relatively late date. There was, however, an intact external door (E, see Fig. 2) to the upper floor, at the extreme south of the west wall, implying an outside staircase leading from a point near the kitchen passage. It was only 2 ft. wide, the arch head, like that of door A, was formed of two voussoirs only, and the almost flat inner arch, likewise of two stones, bore a hollow chamfer. This probably led into a vestibule or antechamber, leaving the larger northern part as the Great Chamber proper. But even this would not have provided complete accommodation for a higher cleric; there was for instance, no oratory, nor place for a garde-robe, both likely adjuncts to an inner chamber or bedroom, and it is suggested that the inner chamber stood above the ground-floor Hall. The stoolings of two more double jambs, with broach-stops (as Fig. 1, P), found among the debris at the west end, probably derived from paired doors leading into these adjuncts, and the absence of a stone quoin at the south-east may indicate that the garderobe was here. This reconstruction would provide a complete and appropriate suite for the Archdeacon on the first floor, with Hall for occasional public use, service-rooms, and probably a separate lodging for a servant (X), on the ground-floor. This would have been the arrangement from a date not earlier than the late fourteenth century: it is possible, but no more, that it made use of flint, but not ashlar, from an earlier lay-out, with a simpler chamber-block and open hall. The flint quoin at the south-east might even have been a relic of a building from Anschitil’s time.
The late medieval roofs must have been substantially intact until the demolition. Lovell records that the cornice was visible in the ‘southeast bedroom’ (i.e. over the Hall) and in the ‘north-west bedroom’, while the demolition showed that it remained throughout the west range. He also says that the roof-trees were exposed in the north-west part and their profile was visible, though plastered in, above the Hall. It is only possible to describe the roof over the west range, and that only as far as it could be reconstructed from dismantled timbers. The cornice, or ‘jowpe’, was in two parts, the upper ‘brattished’ or embattled, over a cavetto and roll, the lower with a plain broad cavetto or hollow chamfer (Fig. 1, Q) again, a purely ‘Perpendicular’ series. The roof was of simple ‘trussed rafter’ type, with light collars and braces, and ashlars rising from the cornice, but without purlins, central or lateral, which points to a date little if any after 1400. But there was at least one ‘medial’ truss, decorative rather than functional, with a heavier and slightly cambered collar (13 in. deep at the centre, 8 in. thick), thin but solid arch-braces, and neat chamfers on the collar and the lower part of the rafters, which again were deeper (9 by 6~ in.) than the common rafters but not functionally ‘principals’. Here, as at Croydon Palace, are echoes of a more western type of roof intruding into the area of Kentish practice. A loose timber among the rubble of the hall (Fig. 1, R) was essentially like the jowled head of a post, with normal tenons to carry wall-plate and tie, but a similar tenon on the under part showed that it was not the top of a post but a short block made to ride over a lower plate while a frontal mortice suggested a second, lower tie; this may indicate that the roof of an earlier open hall had been raised to gain one foot of headroom.
The building invites comparison with the splendid Rectory built by Thomas of Alkham, at Southfleet not far away. Though half a century or so later, Longfield was not only of much less architectural pretension, but more archaic in concept, in that the Great Chamber lay over the service end, whereas at Southfleet (as also at Salisbury Old Deanery, half a century earlier yet), it formed a grand cross-wing at the high end.6 On the other hand, as the hall was apparently reduced to a relatively small apartment on the ground floor, it is also an instance of the urban ‘double block’ type, with single storey hall and second chamber over it, not unknown in priest’s houses of the fifteenth century.7