The purpose of an introduction is to give the reader a preliminary idea of the scope and intention of the pages which follow, and also perhaps to provide an opportunity for the author to include a few words of becoming apologia for the shortcomings of his work. In any case it is designed to be read first; but in almost all cases, I would suppose, it is in fact written last. Few authors know when they set out on the long and often arduous journey of writing a book precisely how it will develop even when the general objective is clear. Thus the introduction must await events, and be adapted as far as possible to them. In my experience, at any rate, this has always been the sequence, and this little history is no exception.
For a number of years I have had it in mind to assemble such facts as I could gather together about the village of Hinton Ampner, and particularly about the various manor houses which have succeeded each other in it. It is not that it is a place of any importance, one which has had famous inhabitants or can boast outstanding beauty of landscape or architecture, but it represents simply one of the little pieces of the jigsaw which go to make up the full picture of the English countryside. And at the present time when the aspect of England is changing with such alarming speed, there may be some virtue in someone who knows one small area very intimately setting down on paper not only a description of the village as it now is but also some account of the principal house and its inhabitants during the past few centuries.
Hampshire seems at present to be a particularly vulnerable county. The wide area of chalk land which takes up about one-third of the centra! part of the county is still largely unspoiled, but it lies between the fast expanding town of Basingstoke in the north and the now almost united towns of Southampton and Portsmouth in the south. How long, one wonders, will this pastoral area escape being crushed and swallowed by these menacing jaws which are gradually engulfing the countryside beyond the chalk hills. For how long will little villages like Hinton Ampner and its neighbours survive amongst the undulations of the wide arable fields and the deep sheltering woodlands. For it is in the midst of this area that Hinton lies, 8 miles due east of Winchester, and so almost centrally placed in the chalk country.
Perhaps in describing the rural charms of this area one resembles William Curtis, a famous son of Hampshire, who in the years following 1777 detailed in his Flora Londinensis the many wild flowers he found in the fields of Battersea and Bermondsey which were soon to disappear beneath bricks and mortar, and who thus left a botanical record of importance and interest. The resemblance to the present account, I should add, lies not in the importance of the subject, but merely in the description of a possibly passing condition.
My original intention was to detail in historical order such sparse facts as I could accumulate about the inhabitants of the manor house, about the long sequence of squires who lived there since the end of the sixteenth century. There was no uncertainty about their names and about the major dates in their lives of baptism, marriage and death for the Parish Registers dating from 1561 are complete and in good condition, and these could be supplemented by inscriptions on monuments in Hinton church and by names and details mentioned in wills.
I had proposed, however, to avoid the first person singular so far as possible, but as I advanced it seemed to me that the later history of the alterations to the house and to the surroundings might have some general interest, and there is no one except myself who is in a position to describe these developments.
Fairly recent happenings soon fade into the mists of the past and insignificant though they are, they may be worth recording. If my predecessors at Hinton had held this view, their notes might now be of absorbing interest. Thus the later chapters become slightly autobiographical, but only in so far as the house is intimately concerned.
Even so the subject remains an exceedingly small one - a mini-subject - but to an author there is one advantage in this: the anxiety lest some other writer, and one of greater ability, is engaged on a work on the same subject, does not exist. No one else, I feel convinced, is compiling a history of Hinton Ampner. This little community which still consists of the traditional group of parish church, Manor House and cluster of cottages, with the addition of a Rectory and a farmhouse or two, remains anonymously buried in the countryside.
The subject matter in the following pages can be divided under three general headings: firstly the village and the countryside in which it lies, with some history of the occupants of the Tudor Manor House; then the various architectural transformations which the house has undergone since the end of the eighteenth century; and finally a description of the development of the garden and the planting of the park. I should probably be optimistic to suppose that any reader would be interested in all three aspects of the place, so it is not unlikely that this little book will fall, not between two but, between three stools - an uncomfortable tumble indeed. However, I must hope that since all three subjects are aspects of the same place this may more or less unite them into a single theme.
A few years ago I noticed a leading article in The Times which was headed 'Growing Interest in Local History'. This, at first glance, I thought would be an encouragement to put together such bits and pieces as I could collect about Hinton Ampner. But I was mistaken, for on reading further I found the following chastening passage about amateur local histories:
'Usually compiled by squires, parsons, lawyers, or aldermen, these works of local piety too often reflect their authors' somewhat claustrophobic preoccupation with manorial history, ecclesiology, and municipal institutions; or else they consist of a miscellany of unrelated facts strung together in whatever order struck the compiler's eclectic fancy.'
Here once again, I fear, is a squire compiling what purports to be a little local history, and treating the subject in a closely circumscribed manner, instead of surveying the parish in a broad sweep. It is my belief, however, that there is little in the early history of the village to provide anything which would be of interest except to archaeologists. However, so as not entirely to neglect the subject, I will mention the following few details.
Like the greater part of the ancient Kingdom of Wessex, the parish is an area which has clearly been inhabited beyond all history, for there are several barrows in the near neighbourhood of the village. On the slope of the hill across the valley to the north of the village is a long barrow of considerable size. At one time there was a tradition that this large mound was raised over the corpses of the soldiers killed at the Battle of Cheriton in 1644. But I think this idea is now exploded, and it is accepted that it must date from the New Stone Age, 2,000 years or so B.C. There are also a number of round barrows, though some which were in arable fields have now disappeared through constant ploughing. These presumably belong to the Bronze Age which ended about 500 B.C. These bare details are all I can offer, I fear, in the way of pre-history. Passing, then, to A.D., there may well have been a Roman settlement here, for some years ago a few pieces of pottery were found when digging took place on the summit of the ridge to the west of the house. Extensive excavations might produce something of interest, but there is no definite clue as to what exact location would be the most promising.
From this point one takes a jump forward of about a thousand years to the mention of Hinton in the Domesday Survey of 1086. The following, in clarified language, is the entry:
'The Bishop himself (of Winchester) holds Hentune. It was always the Minister's, There are 8 hides. In King Edward's time as now it paid gold for 5 hides. There is land for 8 ploughs. In the demesne are 3 ploughs, and there are 15 villeins and 14 borders with 5 ploughs. There are 6 serfs and 8 acres of meadow. There is woodland worth 10 swine. There is a church worth 40 shillings but it pays 50 shillings. In King Edward's time as now it is worth 8 pounds. When received it was worth 100 shillings.'
Hides, which appear in the entry, were small-holdings farmed by free men, men who had risen above the status of serfdom, while the villeins were also free men, but cultivated their holdings at the will of the lord and had various duties to perform in return, and so were slightly lower in the social scale than the holders of hides.
From here, that is to say from the date of the Survey, this squire's amateurish history goes forward for another 500 years until the Stewkeley family make their appearance in the Manor House, and so far as I know there was nothing particular during those five centuries of the mediaeval period to record.
It might be supposed that since there has been a continuity of tenure since the end of the sixteenth century that there would be in existence a mass of documents and letters throwing light on the life at Hinton during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but unfortunately almost nothing has survived, so that the Stewkeleys and their successors the Stawells remain rather shadowy characters. I conclude that early in the nineteenth century, when the house was emptied of furniture and let, all papers which must have accumulated over the previous two centuries were destroyed. It is more than possible that my great-grandfather, John Dutton, who came from a staid and level-headed family, thought it prudent to destroy the evidence of the rather raffish lives of his wife's ancestors who had lived at Hinton, However that may be, I have found only one Stewkeley letter of the remotest interest, and this I quote in the following pages.
There are only two incidents in the history of Hinton Ampner which rise above the normal and uneventful story of an old manor house. The first of these is the Battle of Cheriton of 1644 during which it found itself in uncomfortable proximity to the fighting; and the second is the ghost story of the following century. The latter has been recounted in a number of books on the subject of supernatural manifestations, but I have repeated it in the following pages with such additional details as have been handed down to me.
The tenure of the Hinton Ampner estate was a curious one. From the time that Sir Thomas Stewkeley first took a lease of the Manor, possibly at the time of his marriage in 1597, until 1863 the estate remained copyhold, the owner paying a small fine to the Dean and Chapter of Winchester who remained the ground landlords. In a legal opinion given in 1834 on some point to do with the property I found the following preamble:
'Tenure of the Copyhold Estates is of inheritance with ancient and accustomed fines at sums certain and Heriots due on the Death of the tenants, or alienation.'
At intervals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries documents were drawn up referring to various parts of the property and always citing the descent from Sir Thomas Stewkeley. It seems that all the owners of the copyhold treated the place as entirely their own property, Sir Hugh Stewkeley having his baronetcy created of Hinton Ampner, and the last Lord Stawell demolishing the Manor House and building another. But during all this time the Dean and Chapter remained the Lords of the Manor, and it was not until 1863 that my grandfather enfranchised the property, thus leaving only the advowson of the living in the hands of the Dean and Chapter.
There is one final note I would like to add to this introduction, and it is this. Although there are obvious advantages in writing about a place one knows very intimately, there is also one disadvantage: one is inclined to lose one's critical faculty. Books of travel and chatty guide books are often most successful when written by authors who do not know the country too well. They can convey an impression which is very vivid to a reader, since they see everything with a fresh eye, and can seize on points which are notable to them and so are interesting to record.
This is clearly not my position with Hinton: upwards of 70 years have blurred any critical vision, although the house and its surroundings have changed vastly since I came into the world. And with these changes there is also a slight difficulty. Since they are my own work, should I praise them when they seem to have been successful? Self-praise is not becoming, and in any case it may seem to many misplaced. However, it is a chance one must take, for descriptions in which the writer does not venture an opinion make dull reading.