Heritage Open Days!

The Heritage Open Days for 2009 run from 10th - 13th September and Ashdown House is proud to be a part of the celebration with free admission on Saturday September 12th. Heritage Open Days celebrate England's fantastic architecture and culture and what better way to do so than to visit this unusual and stunningly beautiful seventeenth century hunting lodge, unique amongst the UK's historic buildings. To coincide with this event I will be posting up a blog about the mystery of Ashdown's architect, some information on the different candidates and the evidence supporting each case. It's a real historical mystery! Read the clues - draw your own conclusions on the vision of the man (or woman!) behind Ashdown's brilliant white facade.

All of us who work at Ashdown are extremely proud that this season has seen a huge increase in the number of people coming to see Ashdown House. We are very happy to share this fascinating house and its history with all our visitors. And as we are currently enjoying such lovely late summer weather in Oxfordshire I should put in a word for the Ashdown estate as well. A walk in the woods is the perfect way to spend a sunny September day. Picnic in the grounds, climb to the top of Weathercock Hill for a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, commune with history at Alfred's Castle Iron Age fort or take a walk up to the four Bronze Age barrows and see the whole of the medieval hunting ground spread out before you. The National Trust's little gem of a house is waiting to welcome everyone!

The richest of the rich

Where did it all go right for the Craven family? It began with the birth in approximately 1548 of a son William, to Beatrix and William Craven in Appletreewick in Yorkshire. William was born in one of two cottages that now form part of the church of St John the Baptist in Appletreewick. He attended a "Dames School" in nearby Burnsall, a place where basic education was provided to the children of poor working families before they themselves were old enough to go out to work. In 1560 William got his big chance when he was chosen to be the new apprentice to Robert Hulson, a Burnsall man who had become a merchant tailor in London.

Based on Craven's later career one can speculate about his rise to riches. He was a clever boy who worked hard and was utterly determined to succeed. After he became a member of the Merchant Tailors' Company in 1569, Craven went into businesss with Hulson and when Hulson died he left his former apprentice £5, “a mourninge gown and my shop at Breedstreete corner of Watling Street with the lytle shoppe and warehowse thereunto adjoining, for a terme of three years.” This bequest was made to William "for failthful and diligent service to me done." He had evidently been a loyal and industrious business partner.

After Hulson's death Craven expanded the business and became a Warden of the Merchant Tailors Company on 4th July 1594. He married late, in 1597, when he was already a man of substance and could look for a wife who was younger but was of equal wealth and stature. Elizabeth Whitmore was the daughter of William Whitmore, another merchant tailor, and her brother George went on to be Lord Mayor of London. Elizabeth and William Craven had six children.

William was by now well on the way to making a fortune and moving up in the fluid social world of the Elizabethan middle class. Opportunities provided by trade gave men such as Craven a route not merely to money but also to influential municipal connections. He was elected Alderman of the Bishopsgate Ward of London in 1600, became Sheriff of London in 1601, was knighted in 1603 and became Lord Mayor of London in 1610. He made his money in the wholesale of cloth for the domestic market, providing, for example, cloth worth almost £600 for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth I. Later on in his career he became a moneylender to the aristocracy, and his debtors included Sir Robert Cecil, the 2nd Earl of Essex and the 9th Earl of Northumberland.

Craven was associated with a number of charitable projects in London and he also became a benefactor to Burnsall and Appletreewick. He paid for renovations to St Wilfrid's Church Burnsall in 1612, furnishing the main body of the church and the chancel with seats and "stalls of wainscot" and he walled the churchyard and had gates added. He paid for a bridge to be built over the River Wharf and had a causeway built from Appletreewick to the church. This was visible until the mid-20th century but is now buried. A rather charming verse was painted onto the church wall to record Craven's generosity:

This church of beauty most, repaired and bright,

Two hundred pouds or more, did cost Sir William Craven, knight,

Many other works of charity whereof no mention here;

True tokens of his bounty in this parish did appear.

His place of his nativity in Appletreewick is seen,

And late of London Lord City Mayor he hath been.

There is a second verse in a similar vein referring to "that bountiful knighte" and his genersoity once again! The total sum Craven spent restoring the church and its grounds was about £600, the equivalent of about £80,000 today.

Craven also built and endowed Burnsall Grammar School in 1605, giving £20 per annum to pay a schoolteacher and £10 for an usher (assistant schoolmaster). The scholars received free education in Latin and English but had to pay one shilling a week for tuition in Maths. The school statutes give a fascinating insight into both Sir William's benevolent paternalism and into the influence which the rest of his family were already exerting in local affairs. All documents relating to the governance of the school were to be kept in a chest in the schoolhouse. The chest had three locks and the three keys were held by the Rector of Burnsall, Sir William and his relatives Robert and Antony Craven. The keys were handed down through the family and the statutes decreed that they should be held by "two men of the name of Craven from the Parish of Burnsall" for as long as there were Craven descendents in the parish.

The school was built on land given by Sir Stephen Tempest, the local squire. The Tempest family had been well-established in the Appletreewick area for three hundred years; it would be interesting to know how they felt about the re-appearance of the newly rich and knighted Sir William Craven in a county where they had always been influential, especially as in 1601 Craven bought the manor house Elm Tree in Appletreeewick, which he re-named High Hall. It was situated opposite the cottage where he had been born. Again this seems a significant statement in Craven's rise to eminence.

When Sir William Craven died in 1618 he left a fortune of £125,000, the equivalent of £5.3 billion in today's values which enable his widow and sons to buy a considerable landed estate and his surviving daughters to marry into the aristocracy.

It was said of the later Cravens that Sir William made all the money and subsequent generations spent it. Whilst this is somewhat unfair, a look at the family tree serves to demonstrate the difference that one "boy-made-good" could make to the future of an entire family. Craven's eldest son William went on to become the first Earl of Craven, a notable soldier and the builder of Ashdown and other grand houses. His second son John became Baron Craven of Ryton. One of his cousins became Master of the Horse to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia and another became her usher. Several other Craven nephews and cousins were knighted and married into the aristocracy. Perhaps the most interesting early descendent is Mary Craven who became Lady Andros. As a result of her connection to the first Earl of Craven she gained a place at the court of King Charles II and went on to marry Sir Edmund Andros, gentleman in waiting to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia and later one of the early colonial governors of America. Mary died in Boston in 1688. It was a long way from Appletreewick and a graphic illustration of how high the Craven family had risen on the coattails of one man.

References: Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.richestoftherich.com/richlist.php?richindex=133 , A Short History of Burnsall School by Stockdale and Townend, Burnsall Church and its Story by M L Dawson.

The Herepath

The other day I came across the word "herepath" and didn't know what it meant so being a bit of a geek when it comes to words I looked it up on the internet. As a result I came across the website of the wonderful organisation The Friends of the Ridgeway. This is a great site for anyone interested in the Ridgeway, its natural history, geology, archaeology and history. They have some excellent articles on the legends and literature of the area and whilst I was browsing I came across an entire page on "The Herepath." This turns out to be an Anglo-Saxon term for Army Road and according to the article the greatest military activity near the Ridgeway in historic times was in the Anglo Saxon period because the Romans preferred to build their own army roads and did not use the Ridgeway. Indeed the road that runs from Wantage to Wanborough, along the northern line of the Downs but at a lower altitude than the Ridgeway was originally Roman in origin and called the Portway. This road, unlike the Ridgeway, was built along the spring line so that there was water available to travellers along the route. There was a Roman fort in the field to the south of Ashdown Park (which of course wasn't there at the time!) and a Roman villa was built into the Anglo Saxon site at Alfreds Castle and another only a mile to the west. These were rich lands for Roman agriculture, all part of the timeline stretching from the Bronze Age to the present at Ashdown.

Field of Dreams

To the south of Ashdown Park is a walk that takes you straight back into history. It begins, prosaically enough, in a layby near the water pumping station where you go through a gate into what I call the Field of Dreams. It's a bit like the Secret Garden; on one side you're standing by the road to Lambourn. On the other you're in Deep History.

On your right the remains of the medieval Park Pale of the Ashdown deer park sweep down the hillside, still imposing after hundreds of years. The park pale was erected in the Middle Ages when Ashdown was a hunting chase belonging to Glastonbury Abbey. It consists of a bank and ditch and in places it is still five feet wide and several feet high. Originally there would have been a paling fence on the top too high for a deer to leap.

As you cross the field, the remains of what look like a small camp come into view on your left. Some antiquarian books record this as a Roman fort although I have never been able to discover any details about it or find it on any maps. It's true that there were a number of Roman villas scattered across this part of the Downs, one of which was built into the centre of the Iron Age hillfort at Alfred's Castle. The current road along the Downs beneath the Ridgeway, the Portway, was a Roman Road to the major settlement at Wanborough. So it's possible there might have been a small fort nearby. As is the case with Alfred's Castle, you can see what look like banks and gateways, ditches, entrances and possibly the outline of internal walls.

A little further away across the field is an enormous barrow with a sarsen stone on the top and a ring of what I at first thought were sarsens around the base. On closer inspection they turned out to be tree stumps that looked almost petrified and I wondered if this had once been a site like Waylands Smithy that the Victorians had prettified by adding a ring of trees to complement the rugged beauty of the stones.

As you walk on across the wheat field you have a magnificent view of the park pale ascending the escarpment of Ashdown Upper Wood, a mysterious and ancient woodland with trees up to eight hundred years old and abundant wildlife. The path leads directly to a line of three Bronze Age barrows on the top of the hill. This was a Bronze Age tribal boundary and there are actually four barrows but one of them was sunken and now it is a pool in the winter. As you stand on the top of the hill looking at the sun on the gold dome of Ashdown House you can feel the years roll back. This is a place to come to dream.

Elizabeth of Bohemia and the Gunpowder Plot

In the UK current political climate where the scandal of MPs' expenses claims still rumbles on, newspapers have been drawing parallels with other historic political crises such as the Peasants' Revolt and the Gunpowder Plot. A lot of the comparisons aren't particularly valid - the Gunpowder Plotters, for example, may have planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament but they didn't have the support of the majority of the populace. It did remind me, however, of a connection to Ashdown House - and after all, that is what this blog is all about!

In November 1605, Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James VI and I, was nine years old and was living at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire (the house in the picture at the top), an estate which, coincidentally, the Craven family later bought. Lord and Lady Harington, staunch Protestants, had been charged with "the keeping and education" of the young Princess, as was the wont with royal children in those days. At Coombe, Elizabeth was taught amongst other things, French and Italian, music and dancing. King James did not approve of the education of women, stating that: "to make women learned and foxes tame had the same effect - to make them more cunning." However I think we may assume that by most people's standards Elizabeth was well educated.

In November 1605 strange rumours of a plot to overthrow the monarchy were circulating in Warwickshire, which was a stronghold of Catholicism. On 6th November 1605 Lord Harington was warned of a threat to the princess and Elizabeth was taken for her own safety to the city of Coventry, for it was suspected that she might be seized should a rebellion take place. She was lodged in the city with an armed guard. Later, after the gunpowder plotters had been arrested and tortured, it emerged that it had been their intention to kidnap "the person of the Lady Elizabeth, the king's daughter, in Warwickshire, and presently proclaim her queen." The plan had been to seize her from Coombe Abbey and carry her off to Ashby St Legers, the home of Lady Catesby, mother of one of the conspirators.

It is said that when Elizabeth heard of the plot she declared that she would rather have died with her father and brother than become queen under such circumstances. Of course the plot to blow up parliament failed and when Elizabeth did become a queen it was of Bohemia rather than England. How different matters might have been...

We stayed in Elizabeth of Bohemia's apartments at Coombe Abbey, which is now a wonderfully luxurious hotel. I didn't sleep a wink all night for fear (and excitement) of seeing her ghost!! There will be more about Coombe on the blog in future.

Below Stairs - The Life of A Victorian Servant at Ashdown House

During the Victorian period the Craven family occupied Ashdown House on a permanent basis. This was the only time in the history of the house that it became a proper home and the nineteenth century census records give us fascinating details of both the family upstairs and the servants downstairs. This information is taken from a presentation I give about life at Ashdown in the Victorian period.

In fact the servants were not “downstairs” at Ashdown because the house was so small that there was no servant accommodation in the main building. During the Victorian period additional wings were added to the main house to convert it into the sort of dwelling suitable for a Victorian aristocrat and at the same time the servants’ accommodation was extended. The servants also lived in the two lodge houses and some had homes in Ashdown village. Others walked to work each day from Lambourn, Ashbury, Uffington, Idstone and the surrounding villages.

At Ashdown House the census returns for the nineteenth century illustrate beautifully how a Victorian servants hall would run. The upper servants were the steward or butler, the housekeeper, the cook, the senior lady’s maid and senior valet, the head gardener and the coachman. The steward’s room boy waited on them. They did not eat in the servants’ hall but separately in the butler’s pantry. There were two ladies maids, one for the Countess and one for her elder daughters. The ladies maids earned between £12 and £15 per annum. There were also two valets, one for the Earl of Craven and one for his brother. They earned more – naturally.

At Ashdown the butler’s pantry had cupboards for storage and a table for cleaning. The room was at the front of the house and it had a view of the approach to the house so that the butler could see visitors coming and open the door in advance. It was also his job to iron the newspapers in the morning! He was responsible for all indoor male servants except the valets. He was in charge of the silver plate (though it was the footmen who actually cleaned it), the drink and the table linen, and he was also in charge of the safe.

There were three footmen at Ashdown in 1871 plus one steward’s room man. The footmen waited at table at dinner. They also had duties outside including carrying in the coal, they trimmed the lamps and they stood around looking good! Servant tax was higher on taller servants and people often chose matching footmen because they looked elegant in their livery. They attended the family on outings in London such as to the theatre or opera, riding on the back of the carriage to stop children hitching a free ride. Footmen earned £15 - £25 and could also make a considerable sum in tips. At Ashdown we have a collection of footmen’s chairs from the eighteenth century which were designed so that the footman could sit down facing the back of the chair in order not to crush the tailcoat of his livery.

In the 1861 census the Ashdown House cook was male and French. This was extremely fashionable. He had three kitchen maids and one scullery maid to assist him and they worked in the South Lodge where the kitchen, bakery and brewery were situated. Having the kitchens away from the main house was ideal for the family because as well as reducing the fire risk it also kept kitchen smells away from the main house. Various cunning methods were employed to keep the food warm on its journey across the courtyard from kitchen to dining room. The kitchen and scullery maids at Ashdown were all in their teens or early twenties and they helped prepare the food and did the washing up. All the servants worked from 6am to 11pm. By the Victorian era the kitchen at Ashdown was quite advanced with complexes of roasting ranges, closed ranges, stewing stoves, boiling stoves, turnspits, hotplates and hot closets. Food was kept cold in boxes cooled with ice from the icehouse in the village behind the stables. Larders were kept cool by natural ventilation. There was also a specialised game larder at Ashdown because of the importance of shooting on the estate.

The housekeeper was in charge of the housemaids, of which there were three at Ashdown, and one stillroom maid. She was responsible for cleaning the house, looking after the linen, and providing, storing and preparing tea, coffee, sugar, groceries, preserves, cakes and biscuits. Afternoon tea (which was introduced in the 1840s) added to her responsibilities. She had a room of her own, was in charge of the stillroom, and also presided over a storeroom and closet. At Ashdown the housekeeper’s room contained the china cupboards and linen presses but was a parlour as well.

The housemaids were responsible for drawing the blinds and curtains – and closing the internal shutters at Ashdown - for bringing fresh water for washing before breakfast, at noon, before dinner and at bedtime, and for keeping the fires going. In 1850 the housemaids were paid between £11 and £14. They had a half-day off on Sundays, one evening a week free and one day off per month. Not exactly a generous allocation!

The census returns and estate records give a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the Ashdown servants in the Victorian era. In future pieces I will write more about the outdoor servants and their roles, and also about “Upstairs” – the life led by the Victorian Earls of Craven and their families. If you are interested in the role of Victorian servants drop me a line and I will be very happy to email this complete article to you.

The sale of Ashdown House - Another View

In the last week there have been two articles on the UK national press regarding the sale of the lease of Ashdown House.

One was in The Times. The other was in the Daily Telegraph, complete with pictures of the interior of the house. Now, I'm all for Ashdown Park receiving coverage in the national press. I can think of nothing nicer. Anything that brings more visitors to this stunning National Trust property, to admire the peerless architecture, share the fascinating history and admire the peace and beauty of the countryside has to be a good thing.

Maybe that is why I am so disappointed in the articles I've read because they make no mention of those aspects of Ashdown Park at all. In fact the crucial point - that the house belongs to the National Trust and it is only the lease that is for sale - seems instead to be presented as something of an inconvenience to a potential buyer who might have to tolerate tour groups "straying" (according to the Times) or "parading through the house" according to the Telegraph.

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/article6206028.ece

Excuse me? Am I missing something here? Here are the aims of the National Trust, taken directly from their website:

"The National Trust is a charity and is completely independent of Government. We rely for income on membership fees, donations and legacies, and revenue raised from our commercial operations. We now have 3.5 million members and 52,000 volunteers who gave 2.3 million hours in 2007/08. More than 12 million people visit our pay for entry properties, while an estimated 50 million visit our open air properties. We protect and open to the public over 300 historic houses and gardens and 49 industrial monuments and mills. But it doesn’t stop there. We also look after forests, woods, fens, beaches, farmland, downs, moorland, islands, archaeological remains, castles, nature reserves, villages - for ever, for everyone."

For ever, for everyone. National Trust properties are there to be shared. Visitors are to be welcomed. Those of us who have worked for the National Trust as volunteers at Ashdown House have been doing that for years, making the most of what the house has to offer with energy, enthusiasm, creativity. Wouldn't it be marvellous if the new tenants also shared the Trust's aims and aspirations - and our pleasure in welcoming visitors?