The Building Activities of Henry Oxinden of Barham
THE BUILDING ACTIVITIES OF HENRY OXINDEN
OFBARHAM
JUDITH ROBERTS
Henry Oxinden of Barham (1608-1670) was a prolific letter writer
and note maker. From his correspondence and, more particularly,
from the notes he kept in his common place book, 1 in his account of
the changes he made to his property2 and in the description of his house
and estate at Great Maydekin3 which he prepared prior to its sale in
1663,4 it is possible to reconstruct a detailed record of his building
and garden making activities over a period of about thirty years.
Extracts from these documents have been quoted extensively5 but
there has been no systematic survey of Oxinden's building and gardening
endeavours nor any assessment of the impact these had on an
existing house and landscape. By taking all of Oxinden's papers together
it is possible to reconstruct the changes he made to his house
and its setting within a wider social context. What emerges is a picture
of a country gentleman's intense enjoyment of the quality of his
estate and the social standing it conferred on him.
Henry Oxinden, who was the head of a junior branch of his family,
lived through the turbulent times of the mid-seventeenth century and
was grieved by the political turmoil which divided and separated families.
Although he supported Parliament during the Civil War and
made one attempt at election as a Member of Parliament himself, Oxinden
was on the fringes of politics and was more closely concerned
with his social position within his own circle of country gentry.
Oxinden had no love of London nor for the intrigue of court politics
but he was alive to the value of his connections with a wider and more
influential circle of relations and friends and, like all his contemporaries,
made every effort to manipulate this intricate social network
in times of trouble. Oxinden's main preoccupation, and the great
satisfaction of his life, was with the improvements he made to his
house and estate. Like many country gentlemen, Oxinden was an antiquarian
with an interest in genealogy and the record he kept of his
own, his father's and his grandfather's building work and the simple
351
JUDITH ROBERTS
ceremonies he held to mark the planting of trees in his garden and
orchard, are part of a sense of continuity shared by his contemporaries.
Such a sense of connection would have made the eventual sale
of the principal part of Oxinden's estate to a Greenwich merchant, in
order to clear debts incurred in litigation, all the more distressful.6
Oxinden' s estate of just over 600 acres of arable, pasture and woodland,
lay in the parishes of Barham, Denton and Elham and secured
him an income of about £300-400 a year. The estate had been purchased
by Oxinden's maternal grandfather, James Brooker, in 1563
and included the principal house, Great Maydekin, and a second
house which Oxinden described as, 'now since built with brick in Denton
street' . 7 This house is variously referred to as Little Maydekin,
the Red House and the Brick House, and was occupied by Oxinden's
mother during the 1630s until she moved back to Great Maydekin,
where she died in 1642. Oxinden himself increased the building stock
of the estate by constructing a number of houses which were leased
out to tenants with parcels of land ranging from seven to a hundred and
fourteen acres.
Great Maydekin (Plate I) lies on the border of Barham and Denton
PLATE I
·.. t..u -"!L1.:.I ... ... .
tJ E3 [I □ [l ' -.:.::
. ..
..,..... .. --
rn m .- 0 l ·.· ·.J::I... . j n.. . - j. .• U·c
The present entry front to Maydekin facing the Canterbury-Folkestone
Road
352
THE BUILDING ACTIVITIES OF HENRY OXINDEN OF BARHAM
PLATE II
The South front of Maydekin with yew trees in the garden
(TR 215475); the approach is now directly from the Canterbury to
Folkestone Road (A260) and it overlooks Broome Park to the north.8
A new wing was added or an existing one remodelled in the late
seventeenth or early eighteenth century and behind this there is a
timber framed structure, of several periods and builds, partly brick
underbuilt and tile hung with large gables and a tile roof (Plate II).
There are substantial garden earthworks of unknown date to the north
and south of the house and the surrounding garden walls are of knapped
flint.9 Little Maydekin is on the east side of the Canterbury to
Folkestone road slightly to the north of Great Maydekin (Plate Ill).
The house is of several builds and the brick walls probably reflect
Oxinden's modifications to an existing timber-framed building. The
353
JUDITH ROBERTS
PLATE Ill
Little Maydeki11
garden layout illustrated in a 1746 plan of Little Maydekin (Fig. 1)
matches exactly the description given by Oxinden in his common
place book. 10
Oxinden inherited his estate on the death of his father, Richard Oxinden,
in 1629 and immediately launched a programme of building works
and garden and estate improvements. These were concentrated around
the I 630s although they continued almost until he was forced to sell
in 1663. On the sale of Great Maydekin and the bulk of the estate,
Oxinden moved to Little Maydekin where he continued to garden
with undiminished energy.
Great Maydekin is a timber-framed house and may already have
been old when it was purchased by Oxinden's grandfather, James
Brooker, in 1563. The quality of the structure was a source of pride to
Oxinden; in the sale document he emphasised that the timber is of oak
with no ash or elm. James Brooker had already added to the house by
the I 580s but perhaps the most significant period of modernisation
and structural alteration was undertaken by Oxindens's father, Richard,
in the 1620s when he constructed chimneys at the south side of
the house and: 'Builded from the ground the Hall & Studie & staire
case at great Maydeken, & the rooms over them' . 11 This may represent
354
THE BUILDING ACTIVITIES OF HENRY OXINDEN OF BARHAM
o ao
Fig. I Sketch of the layout of Little Maydekin based on the 1746 plan.
Key, as marked on original plan: [A] House called Little Maydeken, yard
and garden; [B] Sion Fields and Orchards; (C] the six Acres; [D] the Other
House with the Ash Grove; [I] garden; [2] court; [3] orchard, Queen's
Delight; [ 4] orchard, Golden Pi pin.
the demolition and rebuild of the existing hall or signal a newly built
extension to the house and a re-arrangement of the internal space.
The adaptation of the hall and the insertion of brick stacks was well
established in Kent by the second half of the sixteenth century and it
is likely that Richard Oxinden was, at this date, engaged in new building
rather than creating a floored hall for the first time. 12 The elaboration
of the stair and its incorporation within the main body of the
house is one of the distinguishing features of house adaptation and
building in the early seventeenth century and is an indicator of the
restructuring of rooms and status space within the house. The importance
of the stairs in terms of capital and social investment is
355
JUDITH ROBERTS
reflected in Henry Oxinden's record that the structure incorporated
'at least 13 Tunn of Timber' 13 at a cost of £41 16s. 4d. The Great
Maydekin inherited by Henry Oxinden in 1629 was a very different
house from the one purchased by his grandfather. Not only had the
house been extended but there had been major adaptations to its
structure and improvements in the heating arrangements. Great Maydekin,
like the majority of houses in Kent by this date, had been
turned from a medieval into a modern house. What Henry Oxinden
did was to engage in the completion of this revolution.
The concern with the decorative quality of the staircase and the redefinition
of the hall as an entrance and display room for the stairs,
rather than a communal living area, is an indication of the radical
restructuring of social as well as structural space in the house during
this period. Oxinden' s activities illustrate a preoccupation with improvements
in heating both ground floor and upper chambers,14 with
the quality of fenestration and, in particular, with linking the house
with the garden. Oxinden's work, unlike that of his father and grandfather,
was not primarily structural but was concerned with the redefinition
of space within the house by the creation of new room partitions,
new windows and improvements in decorative quality. The
trend towards room specialisation at Great Maydekin had begun in
the l 620s with creation of a study and a closet. By the 1630s Oxinden
had converted that part of the house built by his grandfather in 1580
to make a 'withdrawing room' and had opened up windows and doors
between it and the garden and had made his wife a closet of her own
(Fig. 2).
These improvements in the status and private room space of the
house in turn generated the need for a relocation of both service accommodation
and household servants. In parallel with his development of
specialised social space, Oxinden also relocated and improved the
service space at Great Maydekin by paving and partitioning a series of
butteries, larders and cellars. More particularly, his building accounts
show that he was engaged in creating upper chambers over the services
and partitioning the garret in order to create storage space and
service accommodation. The creation of specialised service space and
the utilisation of vertical space was a well established trend in Kent
by this period and garret chambers, in particular, were often used for
the storage of, for example, cheese or apples, signalling increasing
specialisation in food production. 15 What Oxinden's accounts document
is an example of the social transformation of domestic space at
this period, the increasing concern with privacy and the trend towards
the separation of the family and the household.
The changes Oxinden made to Great Maydekin were clearly not ad
356
THE 8UILOING WORKS OF HENRY OXINDEN
{MANSION HOUSE ONLY)
"".... . - _,
H H H
. 9 .
. • •
. .
T
H H
t.lttl• s 0,-1 •
o.,, •• G.Nr11
10 11
..... Qla.iti,9r
0-lllbH
wn,..,ao Oraat
St.cl:, Pu11t ,., ... , ..... Clrla•Nt
1 2 3 4
'"
1 Waln&cet Sti,dy af!O ClblMI 1Mt
2 ■utaff Ch..mMr add.d ,., p,-,ut&IM ••II Mid llflllttad 91Ht1 1641
3 WW.:01 $$4-0 '1-o wlnd!Jw1 addMI 1e.J3
.,c N- st...-,. and two - wiMi.a 1e33. c,1.,. , ... doo, 1• S.a.td.., 146H 1f40
S N•• -'ntJOw 11,J.3
I l1111't tt. Graat St•,r• 1133
7 N- wtncsow 1533
8 19:tnMd 15'1
5
G•rtn
12
cu.... ,
...
G.arr•t
13
G a,_.., a..-
•
• 7 8
T
T lwu..-y KltdM11
: 6
9 WafMC.OI lrldcloMI adffd 1U0
101.3 lk1M 11-41
14 '-"" a1'd ,-.,11110"'" .,,,u...,.
,,,, ,., .. ,
llfOAI N•rt:•tlar
1A
SERVICES
.. ,, .. ,,.,
•ltia Nffa,
tnllll bHI' ceM1t 111-1
15 Me• bwlft M•Mllff and 11'1111 l'IHN with cl11111JH,. owr 1133
•• ·•Ill MW Marn, 1133
Fig. 2 Summary of the changes made to Great Maydekin by Henry Oxinden.
15
JUDITH ROBERTS
hoe but were part of a planned regime of building work designed to
link the house with the garden. Oxinden was clearly as concerned with
the external expression of the hierarchy of space as he was with its internal
quality. That he had some pretensions towards architectural expression
is suggested by the copy of Serlio he kept in his library and
by the definition of a formal approach to the house by the creation of
a paved court and a porch. 16 Similarly, he manipulated materials and
decorative quality externally to define important rooms.
Oxinden' s documentation of his building works is all the more
informative for the record it preserves of his gardening activities, the
relocation of agricultural and service buildings and the planting up of
his estate. Oxinden 's record has particularly significance since it coincides
with an upsurge of publications written to introduce new farming
and management techniques to the established gentry or serve as
manuals for those who, like Edward Ady who purchased Great Maydekin,
had recently acquired an estate from the profits of law or commerce.'
7 One such publication was Gervase Markham's The English
Husbandman. 18 Markham who describes himself as 'only a horseman',
was a prolific writer on estate and agricultural matters 19 and had
a close understanding of Kent and the Kentish Weald.20 He wrote The
English Husbandman when he was about forty years old and in a
sense his work reflects developments of the late Tudor period, but the
book was reprinted numerous times throughout the seventeenth century
and Markham incorporated sections from it in a number of his
later works. Although the title refers to 'Husbandman' it is clear from
its contents that Markham's intention was to produce a design and
practice manual for owner-managers of small estates. His descriptions
of the embellishments which could 'make descant' on the design
of his basic 'modell of a plaine country mans house' and his references
to 'men of dignitie, who in Architecture are able wonderfully to
controle me', show that he was equally aware of the gentry market for
his works. A comparison of the changes made by Oxinden at Barham
with the model estate described by Markham allows us to move beyond
an analysis of the house and assess the development of Great Maydekin
within its garden and landscape setting. Markham's description
of the component parts of the estate is summarised in Fig. 3. At the
core of the estate is a double cross-wing house which retains its open
hall, apparently heated by a rear stack, suggesting that open halls
were not necessarily uncommon in the early decades of the seventeenth
century. What is interesting in Markham's description is the
way in which the gardens and estate are structured around the house
('all things in a comely convenientness about'), indicative of the
arrangement Oxinden was constructing at Great Maydekin.
358
THE BUil,DING ACTIVITIES OF HENRY OXINDEN OF BARHAM
C WIT!'f •l.T TR@>
1 '1EL"5 - Ii£=
-'0- of§t.q,9
c(.,,s::y- \:Joo
Q6 C D 0
(/ a i2, a
D 0 i) 0
'{/,.:::
I
I
I
!
0
0
0
i-9· -•\
{>:
,s,. "'6 i-
...• •·········
fJE'ltJ
•'-:tfi
c-r.ev
D.:W'.-.-d c,v.
0
0
()
91 l:f'i
w . O;,.
6si%
0
0
"
I&'•,
s Ob 1----------,:...L- ---i----:-:. 7'.. .......... '
+
Fig. 3 The setting of a rural estate based on The English Husbandman by
Gervase Markham.
An important consideration is the relationship of the service buildings
and those buildings associated with the management of a rural
estate. For ease of use, buildings such as the dovecote, stables and
barns have to be relatively close to the house but there is clearly a social
as well as a spatial separation. This is, perhaps, connected more
359
JUDITH ROBERTS
with the increasing emphasis on the architectural quality of the garden
and orchard than with any ideological concern, as later in the eighteenth
century, with the complete separation of service buildings and
the house. It is, however, part of that trend. Throughout the 1630s and
1640s, Oxinden was engaged in either the repair or rebuilding of the
range of agricultural buildings grouped around Great Maydekin. This
work included modifications to the stables and rebuilding the 'Old
Barn which was ready to fall' 21 as well as work on, for example, the
dovecote, well house and malt house. What is significant is that, in
almost every case, he took the opportunity to move the service building
further away from the house. The barn was moved, the malthouse
was moved because it was too close to the withdrawing room and new
walls were constructed redefining the space around the house as
pleasure garden or orchard.
Much of the work to create a pleasure garden was undertaken in the
1630s and appears to be an integral part of Oxinden' s plans for
restructuring the rooms in the house. Creating the garden included the
construction of stone walls and involved a certain amount of earth
moving to make a terrace. This garden also included a summerhouse
which overlooked Denton Street and was directly linked with the
status rooms of the house by a door from the withdrawing room and
a visual link through the windows of the library. This garden covered
an area of about half an acre and was the principal flower garden but
it also included several yew trees close to the parlour, eight walnut
trees before the study, twenty five pear trees along the terrace walk
and a vine trained around the summerhouse. 22 The direct connection
between the garden and rooms such as the parlour and withdrawing
room is part of a pragmatic as well as an aesthetic design. Proximity
to the house provided shelter for fruit but the connection between
house and garden was also valued for the prospect it provided from
all the best rooms. There is a preoccupation with health running
throughout Markham's work and a very clear appreciation of the role
of the garden in enhancing the internal environment of the house, a
connection clearly demonstrated by Oxinden's arrangement of doors
and windows at Great Maydekin.
Although there is no plan of the layout of the gardens and orchards
at Great Maydekin it is probable that they reflected, on a larger scale,
those of Little Maydekin. These gardens had been made initially by
Oxinden' s mother in the 1630s, they were supplied with fruit trees in
the 1640s from the gardens at Great Maydekin, where Oxinden had a
nursery, and were developed by Oxinden himself in the 1660s when
he moved to Little Maydekin following the sale of the estate to Edward
Ady. That Oxinden was an enthusiastic gardener himself is clear
360
THE BUILDING ACTIVITIES OF HENRY OXINDEN OF BARHAM
from the intense interest he takes in the garden making activities of
his neighbours. He kept a detailed record of the trees planted by Sir
Basil Dix well in the creation of his park and orchard at Broome Park
immediately to the north of Great Maydekin, he exchanged trees and
plants with his neighbours and kept a record of where they had been
planted and he took a gardener's delight in the fact that the yield from
his fruit trees was greater than that of his neighbours.
In addition to the pleasure garden and kitchen garden, there were a
number of specialist gardens at Great Maydekin including a hop garden,
orchards and a pear garden together covering around two and a
half acres. Oxinden's hop garden covered about half an acre and was
likely to supply domestic needs rather than be part of any commercial
concern. However, the hop garden is indicative of considerable capital
outlay and its management was likely to be one of the most labour
intensive areas of the garden.23 The status of the hop garden, at least
in the early seventeenth century, is reflected by Markham in The
English Husbandman where the hop garden is included within the
overall garden design and located close to the house. There was also
'a Heartychoke garden' at Great Maydekin. Artichokes had been introduced
from Italy and were highly fashionable usually requiring
walled enclosures and taking up a great deal of space. 24 Following his
move to Little Maydekin, Oxinden devoted space in the flower garden
for the cultivation of artichokes and records that he had, 'five dozen,
& they lasted till September the 29th; had 24 at dinner, Heartichocks
are to be slipped and dunged at Simon & Jude' .25 Like most of his
contemporaries, however, Oxinden was primarily concerned with the
management of his orchard and fruit gardens. Oxinden's orchards
were not a commercial venture but were intended to supply the household
only. In addition to the long lists of the varieties of pear planted
in his pear garden and elsewhere about the estate, Oxinden also makes
several references to fruit trees being planted and trained along the
garden walls and against the walls of the house, and his orchard also
included quince, warden trees, medlars and a 'nutmeg peach tree'. It
is clear from the numerous entries in his common place book that the
cultivation of the orchard was one of his most enduring pleasures.
The management of the orchard was one of the principal concerns of
contemporary garden literature and a theme to which contemporary
writers devoted a great deal of space. Oxinden 's orchard, of something
over an acre of ground, stood on the north side of Great Maydekin
and contained pears and apples. Although he records the varieties
he planted and sometimes the location outside the orchard, for example
against the pigeon house wall or next to the bakehouse, Oxinden
says little about the design and plan of his orchard. However,
361
;z0
JUDITH ROBERTS
+t.2..~11-FEET➔ PL H£:D "JR&C.S
Wl\m::-Q\DI
P£
l>E-scoD Cl.,
PU.l.7v\.
'P3 tn, i+
fo O O O'
I i; 0 0 0
o o o ot.i.
: ol\'6Ll2/$ 0 if
foo
,,
o o 0ol i :l11 tl&tlf '1HltiAI
§:
t./
A.
.1bf:t4t,
0 (jCE {I; t
0 iJt o 5 '('HE:SN'UJS '5 a .tJr l-' 8 fkG
s> R&.nED
Iii
0000
0 0
f>E\R&
0 A.ND r. >
O w-\Elt5 0
0
0
o ooo
0 (l,C1<) t,'1
oo
o ()
o (i
() ◊ "'t
1
a
?z.
,:,
j
q}