Wingham, A medieval Town

WINGHAM, A MEDIEVAL TOWN E. W. PARKIN Wingham, formerly a small market town, lies on the busy main road halfway between Canterbury and Sandwich. Its long main street (Fig. I), presents a wealth of old houses of every period from the thirteenth century onwards, and it is only surprising that so little is known about them. This paper sets out to look at the village generally, to re-examine some of its history, and to summarize its most interesting buildings. It is hoped, in a future article, to publish plans and sections of some of these. HISTORY Despite its situation, close to a ford on the Roman road between Canterbury and Richborough, the only verified Roman settlement at Wingham is a substantial, but isolated villa, of which the bath-house was uncovered by George Dowker in I 881, and a large aisled building more recently excavated by Dr. Frank Jenkins. 1 The site, marked Von Fig. l , is in a field behind the present Wingham Court. The name, originally Wigingaham, is an '-ingaham' name of Saxon origin. By the time of the Norman Conquest it had given its name to a Hundred, comprising, beside Wingham, Ash and three smaller parishes, all of which were chapelries of Wingham, and over whose manors Wingham claimed paramouncy. Wingham was then the richest manor in Kent belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ranking in value before Otford and Aldington, 2 but by what stages it reached this position is problematic. Unlike, say Adisham, there is no persistent tradition of a very ancient donation of the kind often made colourable by a charter concocted at a later date. In the case of Wingham there are two known charters, one with a purported date of 941, both of which may be considered spurious, or at least much altered. 3 These proclaim a 'restoration' by King Edmund to the community of Christchurch of a number of estates, including Wingham, which are represented as having been 'lost', but in many cases it is quite probable that they had 1_G. Dowker, Arch. Cant., xiv (1882), 134, and F. Jenkins, Arch. Cant., lxxxi (1966), lxvt. 2 W. Somner, Antiquities of Canterbury ( 1703), appendix BA, 30. 3 P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters (1968), nos. 477, 515. 61 - Old Timber Framed Houses 􀀡 Other Buildings of Nole 14 Fig. I. Plan of Wingham, showing old Buildings. (Not to scale) WINGHAM, A MEDIEVAL TOWN never been held. At that time the lands of the archbishopric and of the cathedral community were not yet differentiated, although there survives a genuine contemporary charter of the great Archbishop Wulfred, by which, about 830 he granted the community one estate near Wingham,4 presumably from his extensive personal property. It may well be that what was 'recovered' in the mid-tenth century had been Wulfred's private possessions, afterwards sequestrated. Following the Conquest, Archbishop Lanfranc separated the lands of the archbishopric from those of Christchurch and kept Wingham for the see. Wingham Court represents the capital house of the archiepiscopal manor: some timber-framed buildings, of which the age has not yet been determined, are incorporated in the present building. In Domesday Book the manor had been assessed at 40 sulungs and a total value of £77 in the time of King Edward, but 'now' reduced to 35 sulungs, and the value raised to £100. This may be explained by the abstraction of five estates, subinfeudated to various Norman knights as noted in the Domesday Monachorum (which, however, rates them at 7½ sulungs in all). The land in demesne (i.e. the remaining 35 sulungs) had 85 villeins, 20 bordars and 8 serfs - 113 households, implying a population of some 500 or more, a very large viii, but not necessarily concentrated on the present village site. There is no trace of anything approaching a small town in 1086, and indeed, in Professor Du Boulay's study of the Archbishop's lands little is heard of the town, and Wingham is seen as a complex of sub-manors and other agricultural units, some of them not in the parish. 5 A grant of a weekly market was obtained from Henry III in 1252. 6 It was held on Tuesdays at the northern end of the town as it then existed, and where the present High Street widens out (Mon Fig. I). The clerk of the market was an ecclesiastical official and his office, perhaps still identifiable in Hasted's time, may have been in one of the still surviving ancient houses. Wingham had two annual fairs, held originally in the churchyard, but expelled by Archbishop Stafford in 1444 on the grounds of noise and ribaldry. 7 Such markets and fairs were the first step in raising a peasant village to the status of a market town, but this was often as far as they ever got. Wingham indeed appears to be one of these, there being local analogues of about the same date - Lenham, Headcorn, Sevenoaks and Robertsbridge were all under ecclesiastical patronage. The comparative layout and growth of such embryonic towns has yet to be studied - Robertsbridge, for example, is an artificial 'secondary' 4 Ibid., no. 1268. The estate, Sceldesford, is apparently lost. 5 F. R. Du Boulay, The Lordship of Canterbury (1966}, passim, esp. 384-90. 6 E. Hasted, History of Kent, 2nd edn., ix, 224. 7 A. Hussey, Chronicles of Wingham (1896}, 33. 63 E. W. PARKIN settlement, 8 but Wingham appears to have been unplanned. The basic plots are separated by alleys, but, except perhaps for those immediately flanking the former market-place, there is no sign of tenements of equal depth, let alone burgages. It is the simplest one-street town, lacking a broad market-place at a convergence as at Sevenoaks, or a square, as at Lenham. If we ignore the canons' houses, and the thin scatter beyond the bridge, there appears to be hardly more than a dozen plots on the east side, and maybe fewer· on the west. The more marginal plots certainly contained, or came to contain three or four dwellings (cf. nos. 17, 18, 19 below), but the central ones (cf. no. 27) were probably intended for only one - perhaps making three dozen houses in all in the later Middle Ages. Does this constitute a town? If the plots are properly and intensively used it does. The final tale at Robertsbridge was under fifty, and in Hasted's day the town of Wingham contained about fifty houses, including the canons' houses, then secularized. THE PREBENDAL COLLEGE The college of Wingham was projected by Archbishop Robert Kilwardby in 1273, the foundation deed being signed at Wingham Manor on August 2nd, 1282, the first buildings were consecrated on July 23rd, 1283, there being some opposition to the scheme at that time. The royal consent did not, however, arrive from Edward I until July 1290. Hussey 9 gives a translation of the foundation deed of the college, and a list of the provosts and canons. The house of the provost was situated immediately to the east of the parish church, on the site of an earlier vicarage, close to the present Wingham House (P on plan). After the Dissolution the provost's house became the property of the Crown; this was in 1538, and it was eventually sold by Edward VI in 1553 to Sir Henry Palmer for the sum of £519-11 s-4d, being altered and enlarged by him, and later described as a large, gabled Tudor house known as 'The College'. This house was finally demolished about 1830, and the present Wingham House built in the Regency style, with the fashionable iron verandah of the period. Facing Wingham House, on the south side of the street, is a row of very attractive timber-framed houses, long known as 'Canon Row' (Plate IA). These were the residences of the canons, originally six in number, and according to the deed of foundation, named after the places of their endowment, viz. Ratling, Peddinge, Wymlingswould, Chilton, Twitham and Bonnington. 10 These properties once extended H D. Martin and B. Mastin, An architectural History of Robertsbridge (Hastings Area Archaeological Papers, v, 1974). ;0 Hussey, pp. cit., 24. Ibid., 32. 64 WINGHAM, A MEDIEVAL TOWN back much further than they do now, 11 but a fire, it is believed in 1660, destroyed certain buildings where the present vicarage stands ( 13 on plan), damaging the Dog Inn. The date 1661 on the inn refers to its restoration. The demise of the college began in 1511, when the number of vicars choral was reduced to four, and a chaplain and a vicar, who had been at one time monks at Boxley and Evesham respectively, were ordered to cease wearing their monastic habits. 12 In 1535, Richard Benger, a canon, was accused of upholding the cause of the Pope, and in 1538 the end finally came, the foundation being dissolved, and its properties seized. A story told by Dugdale recalls how the Lady Elizabeth, daughter of the Marquis of Juliers (Jiilich), niece of Edward 111, took the vows of a nun after the death of her husband John, Earl of Kent, a brother-inlaw of the Black Prince. Later she repented of this and secretly married Sir Eustace d'Aubrichecourt, of Denne Court near Sandwich. This took place ' . . . before the sun rising on the feast of St. Michael, in the year 1360 at the chapel of the dwelling house of Robert atte Brome, a canon of Wingham,' 13 The news of this eventually reached the Court and caused a nationwide scandal. Both were summoned to appear before Archbishop Is!ip, who imposed heavy penalties on them. Throughout the Middle Ages, Wingham must have witnessed much coming and going through the then important port of Sandwich. Edward I stayed in the town for three days as a guest of Archbishop Winchelsea from September 28th, 1295. Edward II visited Archbishop Reynolds there in the summer of 1321, while Archbishop Meopham entertained Edward 111 on April 20th, 1331. After the Dissolution, the archiepiscopal mansion remained in the hands of the Crown until 1630, when Charles I ' ... granted the place called Wingham Court, with the demesne lands of the manor to trustees for the use of the City of London, at a yearly farm rent of £27- 6s-8d, from whom it was conveyed at the latter end of that reign to Sir William Cowper, knight and baronet, in whose descendants it has continued down (in 1799) to the Rt. Hon. Peter Francis Cowper, Earl Cowper.' 14 The Cowpers formerly resided at Ratling Court nearby, 15 and later members of the family include the poet of that name. The rents and profits of the estate, however, remained with the 11 W. A. Scott Robertson, Arch. Cant., xiv ( I 882), 2. 12 Knowles and Hadcock, Medieval religious Houses (1971), 444: 13A. Hussey, 'Some Account of the Parish of Wingham (Hl