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Peter Brown Family History

Places: - Priest House at West Hoathly

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The rectory (Priest House)at West Hoathly was occupied from 1524 by  John Brown (died 1546), then by his son Thomas (died 1581), then by his son John Brown (died 1608) then by his son John Brown (born 1594), then by his son John Brown (born 1628, died about 1700). The last John Brown accumulated debts and was forced to sell the house.

The house was originally an open hall, with a living room & upper chamber on the north end & a service end with a buttery, pantry & solar to the south. The roof was probably thatched. However, Thomas Brown had begun to mine iron ore on his land for the foundries working around West Hoathly. He now styled himself “yeoman” & needed a house to match his new status. By the end of the 16th Century The Priest House was probably the finest building in the village & Thomas Browne could call himself “squire”.

His descendants had the title “Lord of the Manor of the Rectory”

History

• In 1420 the monks of Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes created a MANOR OF THE RECTORY of WEST HOATHLY as a ‘subinfeudation’ of the Manor of Lindfield. This was initially just land but a tithe barn was built and then in 1420 the PRIEST HOUSE was built. The manor retained the Saxon custom of ‘Borough English’, inheritance by the youngest son or daughter.
• In 1524 the Priory leased the Rectory Manor to John Browne, a “hardworking husbandman” (A tenant farmer who cultivated the land) of the parish & The Priest House became a family home. The Prior of Lewes was glad not to have to trouble about the agriculture of land seventeen miles away.
• It is evident that when the Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes, leased the manor and the Priest House to John Browne, a new arrangement must have been made about the dwelling for the parish priest. but the lease makes no mention of any parsonage.
• In 1538 Henry VIII seized the property of Lewes Priory & the Browne’s Manor was given to Thomas Cromwell, the King’s secretary & chief adviser. When Cromwell was disgraced & beheaded in 1540 the Manor formed part of the divorce settlement of Anne of Cleves. John Browne, however, continued as tenant until his death in 1546.
• At the dissolution of the Lewes Priory ( arising from the “dissolution of the monasteries”) the Browne’s, as lords of the Manor of the Rectory, had to pay the pension of the Vicar because he was one of the dispossessed monks. This arrangement was to continue as long as the Vicar was still one of the ex-monks.
• John Brown was succeeded by his son, Thomas who after the death of Anne of Cleves he paid rent to Queen Mary for a year & then to Elizabeth I. In 1560 the Queen sold all the property that had once belonged to Lewes Priory & Thomas Browne bought the Manor lands & The Priest House. He then set about modernising it.
• The house remained in the hands of the Browne family for another hundred years but their fortunes were in decline & by the end of the 17th century they were bankrupt. In  1695 the house & Manor had to be sold to pay their debts. It was sold to Sir John and Francis Gyles, (fn. 41) as trustees for the marriage settlement of their cousin Anne Hooper, whose second husband Robert Hooper was Attorney-General in Barbados.
• The actual Manor House of West Hoathly is on the west side of the street opposite the church. It was built as a dower house in 1627 by the Infields of Gravetye.

The Building

 

• The Priest House was once a simple building but it has been complicated by six centuries of habitation. It is a perfect example of the development of a building & it is the alterations that make it such an interesting and important house.
• 'The Priest House', at the south end of the street on the west side, is a 15th-century house facing approximately east. The rectangular plan is of five bays, the two northernmost being the original solar wing, the next two the great hall, and the southernmost the buttery.
• The frame is of oak, held together by oak pegs & filled with panels of wattle & daub (exposed panels can be seen in the south bedroom) and in part covered with weatherboarding.
• To one side of the present front door is the arch that formed the original medieval doorway. The original pointed doorway to the screens, next to the buttery, is now blocked and another doorway made next north of it. The new doorway cuts through the sill beam to the modern floor level. The ground floor level was lowered to accommodate the massive stone chimneys that replaced the medieval open hearth. The chimneys enabled two new rooms to be created upstairs, each with their own fireplace.
• In the doorway is a rough iron slab, waste from a local furnace, which is supposed to stop witches entering the house. The original doorway would have formed the entrance to a “cross passage”, leading to a smaller back door. Doors lead off to the left into the buttery & pantry, where the food & drink were stored. Above this “service” end was an upper floor for storage.
• To the right of the front door was the “hall”, with an open hearth in the middle of the floor. The hall was open to the roof & the timbers in the south bedroom have been blackened by smoke from this fire, in spite of smoke vents in the roof.
• Light came from a large unglazed window, open from almost ground level to the eaves. The floor was of beaten earth, covered with rushes & sweet smelling herbs.
• The chimneys were built & the central ceiling inserted c1580, with local stone for the fireplaces & fashionable (& expensive) bricks for the upper parts & stack. The stone sides of the inglenook are worn where knives have been sharpened. Circular marks & scratches have been carved in the fireplace beam for goodluck.
• Next to the fireplace is the bake-oven. It was heated with faggots of wood or gorse. When the oven was at the right temperature the fire was raked out & the bread put in with a peel. The door was put over the front & could be sealed with clay or spare dough.
• Leading off from the kitchen is the parlour. This was a private living room but has never had a permanent fireplace so it was probably used mainly in the summer. The north end may be a later addition.
• As in other small houses of this period, the roof was continued from end to end with an unbroken ridge line; it retains three of the ancient trusses; one, the middle truss of the hall, had arched braces below the tie-beam; one brace still re mains: the next to the north was the closed framing of the end of the hall and has a king-post strutted from the tie-beam; and the third, the middle truss of the solar, is similar.
• Upstairs the roof construction is a “crown post & collar purlin”. The rafters are in pairs, halved at the top & held together by a horizontal “collar”. Supporting the collars is the “collar purlin”; supported by the “crown posts”, which take the weight of the roof down to the “tie beams”. This is all held in place by curved braces.
•  In the 16th century an upper floor was inserted in the hall and the central chimney-stack built in the south bay of the hall, right against the middle truss, but as it did not fill the whole bay the framing of the south end-wall was removed and the space thrown into the buttery wing. It has fire-places 8¼ ft. and 6¼ ft. wide in the lower story with stone jambs and wood bressummers, and one on the first floor, in the north side, has moulded stone jambs and four-centred arch in a square head.
• At some point much of the old timber was cut away & new beams were inserted at a higher level to give more headroom. When the house was restored in the early 1900’s much of this new timber had to be replaced.
• The timbers support a roof of sandstone “Horsham tiles”, (weighing around 16 tons). The original roof was probably of heather thatch.
• At the south end of the house is an “outshot” c1600, under a sloping “catslide” roof..
• The buttery has original wide flat ceiling-beams: those in the middle bay are stopchamfered, and those in the solar wing are rougher and probably later repairs. The remains of one original window with diamond-shaped mullions are left in the back wall of the buttery, and there are others of the 16th or 17th century.
• The house, once two tenements, has a staircase at each end.

Sources

1. From: 'Parishes: West Hoathly', A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 7: The rape of Lewes (1940), pp. 164-172. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=56941.
2. "The Story of a Forest Village - West Hoathly", by Ursula Ridley,
3. The Priest House: West Hoathly: Teacher’s Notes
4. Adrian Channing:

© Peter Brown 2008 ; Last Updated 30/07/08