At the start a few words should be said about the early history of Hinton Ampner, but they will indeed be few for there is little to be said. There were no famous names connected with it in mediaeval times, no exciting events to record, no seizures by the Crown, no handing out as a reward to a deserving subject. Its history seems to have been completely uneventful. It was already in the possession of the Bishop of Winchester at the time of the Domesday Survey (1086), and it appears to have remained quietly attached to the Priory of St. Swithun at Winchester for the following four and a half centuries.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1535 had no dramatic repercussions for the Manor. It simply passed into the possession of the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral and continued its uneventful existence. During the regime of the Priory there was apparently a small house standing close to the west end of the church, and this is thought to have been burnt down about the time of the Dissolution. This is no more than a vague tradition: there is no exact record of the occurrence, and equally nothing to indicate its position, but the fact that the next building erected arose on a site so unusual for a Tudor manor house suggests that it may have replaced the previous manor. In any case the rebuilding must have been undertaken soon after the estate came into the possession of the Dean and Chapter of Winchester.
During the Tudor period there were generally two prime considerations when choosing a site for a house—shelter and a water supply. Thus houses were usually situated in a valley where hills and trees protected the building from the winds, and no more than a shallow well would provide an adequate supply of water. There must then have been some good reason for these sixteenth-century builders to erect a house on the very summit of the ridge where it would be fully exposed to every wind, and where it would appear to have been a difficult task to sink a well sufficiently deep to orovide water. It is possible that the well was already in existence, and that this had been found to tap an underground spring at no very great depth. This fact and the proximity of the church may have outweighed fears about exposure to the elements. The well, it may be added, still exists and, now considerably deepened, provides the house with fresh, pure water very different from the flat chemically treated supply which comes from the mains.
The house then built was to survive for more than two centuries, but no picture, no drawing of it, apparently exists. No one seems to have thought of perpetuating its appearance before its demolition in 1793. There is, however, one clue to its appearance: a plan, a very elementary plan. This is included amongst the papers of Admiral Lord St. Vincent, at the British Museum (for reasons which will appear later) and shows at least the outline of the house and also the position of some of the rooms. This, with some knowledge of the general trend of vernacular domestic architecture of the period, makes it possible to build up a picture of this vanished house.
It was in the familiar form of an E with slightly projecting end wings and a porch rather to the west of centre, facing almost due south; the north front was apparently flat. There were two main floors with attic rooms for the servants in the roof, and it was clearly of ample size. There was a great hall, two parlours and a 21 bedchambers, in addition to kitchens, bakery, larders and service rooms, as well as a brewhouse and a malthouse, which were necessary in order to make a country house largely self-supporting. Near the house was a hop-garden which with the barley from the estate presumably provided the raw materials to justify the two latter buildings. But hops, it seems, must have changed in character if they consented to grow in this unsuitable, limey soil.
Enlightening particulars of the house are provided by a survey made in 1649, when the Manor and estate were seized by Parliament and put up for sale. The original manuscript still exists in the Cathedral Library at Winchester. The preamble to the particulars is as follows:
A Survey of the Mannor of Hinton Ampner ... in the month of August 1649 by virtue of a Commission to us granted upon an Act of the Commons of England assembled in Parliament for the abolishing of Deans, Dean and Chapters, Canons, Prebends and other officers and Tythe of and belonging to any Cathedral or Collegiate Church or Chappell within England and Wales.
There then follows in addition to the details already given a list of the following outbuildings:
A rush house, a mill house, a bake house, a nursery, a foulding house, a well house, a drove house, a granary and stable, all covered with tyle, built the greatest part with brick and stone, the rest of the dwelling house with Timber and Flemish wall, also a Malthouse, three Stables under one roof, two great barns, and several outhouses, all built with timber and covered with thatch, and two gardens, two orchards well planted, a handsome large Court, well walled, a large outyard and a well yard, also a handsome bowling green with a little house thereon.
It was altogether a considerable establishment; but in case these particulars were not adequate to attract a buyer, the survey describes further charms:
The site of the house is very pleasantly situated, a good Ayre, very delightful for hunting and hawking, six miles distant from the City of Winchester, 2 miles from the market town of Alresford and 12 a miles from Southampton.
It must be said that Hinton has receded considerably from these three towns during the past three centuries.
The delights of the place successfully attracted a buyer in one Sir John Hippesley who paid the sum of £2,587 17s.5½d. for the Manor. Nothing further is heard about Sir John, and one supposes he made a bad bargain, for the estate was returned to the Dean and Chapter on the Restoration in 1660, and the Stewkeley family remained in possession of their hereditary copyhold paying the septennial fine.
There is some interest in the description of the house as being built in brick and stone. There is no stone available in the near neighbourhood, and it may perhaps have been brought from Selborne. It would have been used for quoins at the corners of the house, for outlining the gables, and for the surrounds and mullions of the casement windows. The bricks, on the other hand, may have been produced almost on the site, for part of the park is traditionally known as the Brick Field, and in it is a large pit from ivhich the clay may have been dug and burnt in a kiln there built for the purpose.
It seems to have been a simple building, very similar to many other manor houses which were erected during the decades on either side of 1550 in the vernacular style before the new-fangled ideas of the Renaissance had begun to percolate into the countryside. The survey mentions that the parlours were 'wainscoted', so these rooms must have been lined with the small-scale panelling which was usual at that period. The hall, which was apparently entered direct from the porch without a screens passage as would have been the case at a rather earlier date, was only one storey in height. At least in the plan drawn in the eighteenth century there were bedrooms over it on the first floor, though it is possible, of course, that these had been introduced in the seventeenth century.
A point I have not been able to elucidate is who built the house. It seems unlikely that the Dean and Chapter would have gone to the expense of erecting so large a building, and it seems more probable that they leased the property on a copyhold tenure to some family on the condition that they replaced the destroyed building with a new manor house. It would have been this lease that Thomas Stewkeley took over just before 1600 when the name of this family first appears in the Church Registers.
This entry is Thomas' marriage to Mrs. Elizabeth Goodwin on 30th June 1597. His younger brother George was also married at Hinton five years later to Mrs. Elizabeth Drewell. Elizabeth Goodwin was the daughter and sole heiress of John Goodwin of Over Winchenden in Buckinghamshire. Her inheritance, however, does not appear to have materialized quite as easily as Thomas had no doubt hoped, for in 1600 a case was brought in the 'Queen's Court at Westminster' by Francis Goodwin against Thomas Stewkeley Armiger and Elizabeth his wife', claiming the property covering apparently over 3,000 acres at Upper Winchenden and Waddesden. This Francis may have been an uncle or cousin of Elizabeth's: he was certainly not a brother. He seems to have had a fairly good claim, for the case was settled by the payment of £2,000 to the Stewkeleys in exchange for the property.
It remains a mystery, however, why Thomas and Elizabeth were married at Hinton when neither appears to have had any previous connection with the place. There are, it is true, various entries in the Registers of Godwins, with every possible variety of spelling, but there seems nothing to connect these with the family from Over (or Upper) Winchenden. It is just possible, however, that it was a member of the Godwin family who built the house.
This Thomas Stewkeley, who was the first of my ancestors to live at Hinton, came from Marsh near Dunster, in Somerset, where his family had been settled for several generations and where they seem to have owned considerable property, some of which their descendants retained until this century. I have the impression that they were hardheaded people, good at business and with a shrewd eye for an heiress.
The very long and detailed will which Thomas' father made in 1587, the year before his death, shows that he had extensive property in Somerset, and also interests in London. He asks that if he should die in the latter place he should be buried in the chancel of St. Sepulchre's 'in the suburbs of the City of London', but if in Somerset then in 'the chancel of the late priory church of Dunster over against my seat or pew'. In the event it was Dunster which received his bones. After a number of small legacies to relations, godsons and household servants 'as long as they do behave themselves honestly and dutifully', he left £100 to Lady Burleigh 'to get the wardship of my heir'. Thomas Stewkeley was then eighteen years old so the wardship would not have been of long duration. But perhaps he thought that Lady Burleigh would see that his wish was fulfilled that 'my son Thomas apply his study in the Common Laws of this Realm of England in the Inner Temple, London'. Until he became an 'utter barrister' the boy was to be given £24 a year for his maintenance, and £30 when he had achieved this status.
On his marriage Thomas' condition was to brighten somewhat for he was to receive all his father's plate, including 'my best bason and ewer parcel gilt, and my great nest of bowls parcel gilt, my best salt with a cover gilt', and much else of the same sort, although a large part of it could be used by his widow 'if she keep herself unmarried'. Under the same condition she receives 'my mansion house at Marsh' with its contents and all the livestock, and lands and tenements in the parishes of Marsh, Carhampton and Dunster, including 'the rectory and parsonage' at the last, 'with all the tithes great or small'.
There then follows a long list of Manors in Somerset and Devon which are to be held in trust for some years and then go to his son Thomas and his heirs male, and, if these fail, then to the second son George. The latter anyhow receives all the lands in Stepney, Whitechapel, Fulham, Baling and Brentford, in County Middlesex and then to his heirs male; but if these fail, then back to Thomas. All this, and there is a good deal more in the will, indicates very substantial wealth, nevertheless the three daughters receive no more than £100 apiece, but an additional £566 13s. 4d. if they marry with their mother's approval. Clearly Hugh Stewkeley had no intention of allowing the estate, which he had built up, being dissipated amongst daughters.
Thomas Stewkeley who, as has been said, was married at Hinton, had three surviving sons all of whom were bred to the Law like their father. They were entered at the Middle Temple, the elder two in 1621 and the youngest in 1626, and their legal training must have been useful to them in their careers. Thomas was knighted by James I soon after his accession. It was no doubt one of those honours that the King handed out very freely - and at no cost to himself - to landowners and squires whose influence in the country was an important factor in maintaining the stability of the Crown. Local gentry in hundreds received the accolade, and in return became warmly attached to the royal cause.
Thomas' eldest son Hugh did even better than his father, and in 1637 obtained a baronetcy. This was a more substantial honour and was perhaps awarded by Charles I on the principle inaugurated by his father in return for a douceur of between £1,000 and £2,000 which was supposed to go towards the maintenance of the army in Ulster, but was in fact more usually devoted to personal debts. In any case the young man was only 24 years of age when he blossomed into Sir Hugh Stewkeley of Hinton Ampner Baronet, so it seems unlikely that he had already rendered any material services to his country.
Sir Thomas Stewkeley made over Hinton to his son, probably on his marriage, and went to live at a house named Foxleys at Bray. There he died in 1639, aged 70, and was buried in the church there. His widow, however, who survived him for a decade, was buried in the vault at Hinton.
The Stewkeleys were by no means simply country squires, for connection with the City of London was close ever since, as well as possibly before, Thomas' father had married a daughter of Richard Chamberlayne, Alderman of London. Several left instructions in their wills that if they die in London they are to be buried in one of the City churches, so clearly a large part of their lives was spent in the business centre of England. But what their apparently profitable occupation was, has never been clear, or how they acquired the necessary wealth to buy properties in many different parts of the country. There is no indication that they were merchants, so perhaps they were astute dealers in property.
From an Inquisition taken at the Guildhall in 1640 on the estate of the late Thomas Stewkeley, it appears that he owned extensive property in London. There is particular mention of:
The whole capital messuage called Northumberland House or Northumberland Place, and also two gardens adjacent to the said messuages, commonly called the Upper Garden and the Lower Garden with all belonging, situate and being in the parish of Sts. Anne and Agnes below Aldersgate London, and 20 messuages, 10 cottages, 30 shops, 10 cellars and 6 gardens with their belongings situated in the parish of Sts. Anne and Agnes Aldersgate.
It is regrettable that none of all this drifted down the centuries to Thomas' descendants. Another investment was an interest in the ferry over the Thames at Fulham. It had been bought by Thomas' father who was Deputy Steward of Fulham in 1546, and bequeathed to his second son, George. On George's death in 1606 it passed to Thomas, who sold his share soon after. Clearly the Stewkeley family had many and varied financial interests.
During the disturbed years leading to the outbreak of the Civil War Stewkeley entries, principally baptism of the children of Sir Hugh, continue to appear, but on 27th September 1642, a month after King Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, the baronet died at the early age of 38 leaving his widow and three young children in the Manor House. Two years later Lady Stewkeley was to find herself in uncomfortable proximity to the engagement which, according to Clarendon 'broke all the measures and altered the whole scheme of the King's counsels'.
From the third week in March 1644 it became clear that there would have to be a decisive engagement between the Cavaliers under Lord Hopton, quartered in and around Winchester, and the Roundheads under Sir William Waller who were advancing through Surrey into Hampshire. By the 25th of the month the London Brigade, which represented the greater part of Waller's troops, had reached the village of West Meon and had already had a number of skirmishes with the King's men, but it was not until the 28th that the two armies, each consisting of about 10,000 men, were poised for the engagement which came to be known as the Battle of Cheriton. The Cavaliers were massed on the high ground south of Alresford and the Roundheads were on the long Lamborough ridge across the valley on the north side of Hinton. From the windows of the house the unfortunate Lady Stewkeley could have had an almost grandstand view of the battle which began at ten in the morning of the 29th amongst the hedges and coppices on the undulations which lay between the two armies. Before nightfall the Cavaliers had been defeated with such great losses that Lamborough Lane is said to have run with blood. It was a defeat from which the King's cause never recovered. But in London the news was received with the utmost joy; and the House of Commons ordered that 9th April should be celebrated as a day of public thanksgiving.
While the Cavaliers were being so bloodily defeated at Cheriton, Winchester Castle, from which a large part of the troops had sallied forth, was held by Sir William Ogle and a garrison. Their position, following the outcome of the battle, was almost hopeless, but for a year and a half they held out in spite of constant attacks, and it was not till 5th October 1645 that in the face of a determined siege they surrendered. General Ogle was well treated by Cromwell, for he and his officers were allowed to leave for Woodstock, while the men dispersed to their homes. It was indeed in some ways a highly gentlemanly war.
As a reward for his heroic resistance the King created Ogle Viscount Ogle of Catherlough in Ireland on the 23rd December 1645. This was no more than a small compensation for the grave reverses the general had suffered. His wife, who had been in the Castle with her husband, had been allowed to leave, but died on the day of surrender at Stoke Charity a few miles from Winchester, the unfortunate Ogle thus not only losing his wife but also 'one thousand pounds a year with her'. A double blow, but one he remedied to some degree about two and a half years later by marrying the widowed Lady Stewkeley. Whether the ceremony took place at Hinton, it is impossible to say for there are no entries of any sort in the Parish Registers after September 1644 until the same month four years later when the following note appears:
'ffrances Goodwin Mr of Arts of Trinity College in Cambridge took possession of ye Paris Church of Hinton Almner.'
The entries then begin again, and one must presume that during the interim the Hinton flock had been without a shepherd.
The lives of the newly married couple in those disturbed times were clearly not easy. In November 1646 Lord Ogle had been fined £250 as a Compounder, the sum being assessed at one-tenth of his assets, and his finances do not seem to have rallied from this setback, for in December 1648, the year he married Sarah Stewkeley, he was committed to the Upper Bench prison for debt. Eventually he was released and soon after the Restoration the couple retired together to Lady Ogle's 'jointure house' at Michelmersh, near Romsey, and there Lord Ogle died and was buried in 1682.
I still own the lordship of the manor of Michelmersh - a now empty honour, and all that remains to me of the property which my predecessors acquired there in 1607.
There was another unexpected link between those who took part in the Battle of Cheriton and the family at Hinton. Amongst those captured by the Parliamentarians was Sir Edward Stawell, who was the great uncle of Edward Stawell, who came to live at Hinton 75 years later, having married in 1719 Mary Stewkeley, the granddaughter of the widow who during the battle was sheltering in the Manor House. It is pleasant to learn that both these Cavaliers survived the ordeal of this momentous day and lived well into the reign of Charles II.
The second Sir Hugh, who was only six years of age at the time of the battle, maintained, at least in his first marriage, the family's characteristic of shrewdness by marrying before he was 20 the only daughter and heiress of Sir John Trott, whose property of Laverstoke in the north of the county she inherited. Of their four children only a daughter survived who succeeded to her mother's estate. Lady Stewkeley died on aist October 1679 and was buried at Laverstoke. The inscription on her monument, which is now in Hinton Church and which I have already described, suggests that she had a rather difficult character, that is to say if one reads correctly between the lines. The anonymous author, who cannot I think have been the bereaved husband, described her character in the following terms:
She was equall to the Wisdom of the bravest of Men
Friendlie to the Ignorance of the meanest of women
Yet she was not altogether exempt from, the
Comon Fate wch attends all Eminencie of Parts
Of being in some things misunderstood
The author, having thus pronounced his rather equivocal praise, breaks into verse:
What certain Judgement can the Vulgar make
Where in the Wise wth all their Art mistake
Those of mean Parts uncensured life and Dye
They've nothing to provoke an Envious Eye
The Dull oblige Mankind
And all their Love engage
Whilst tis a Crime to be refined
Above the present Age.
Above these lines, inscribed on the page of a marble book, the bust of Katherine Stewkeley looks out haughtily from her black-painted niche. There seems little doubt from this inscription that she considered herself the mental superior of her probably rather boorish husband. One wonders how she would have felt had she known that her monument was to be brought to join that of her husband in the church at Hinton.
Two years after the death of Katherine, Sir Hugh was married to Mary Young of Exton, a village a few miles to the south of Hinton. The marriage took place at Hinton on 21st December 1681, the Rector adding after the entry in the Church registers his good wishes for the happiness of the union 'Qui splendide et foelisiter vivunt, vivunt peror'. Probably having been snubbed by the first Lady Stewkeley with her superior airs, he was hoping for a more genial atmosphere at the Manor House under the influence of the squire's new bride.
The second Sir Hugh, who was destined to be the last male representative of the Stewkeleys, is the only one of the family on whose personality any ray of light is thrown beyond bare dates in the registers. This is due to an occasional reference to him in the Verney Memoirs. His uncle, John Stewkeley, had married Cary Verney, Lady Gardiner as she continued to call herself from her first marriage, who lived with children and step-children at Preshaw, 3 miles from Hinton, a house which John had inherited from his maternal grandmother, Lady Sandys. The references are not very flattering, but Cary makes the best of an obviously rather difficult man: 'He is very good to me, though hee will sometimes lett us understand hee is lord over us. I truly love him very much for his care of my children.' Hugh paid for the schooling of his young cousins and on this account felt justified in choosing the school the boy attended. 'Brother Stewkeley's (he was in fact her nephew by marriage: she did not marry John Stewkeley until 11 years after the first Sir Hugh's death) humour is to love change which is the undoing of boys', wrote Cary to Sir Ralph Verney, (and my boy loves the place very well wher he is, which I commend in him; my brother's humors and extravagant exprestions I have to sadly felt, but I must smother thim all for my children's good.'
Sir Hugh was clearly becoming increasingly tiresome, and no doubt he did not hesitate to emphasize the fact that this large and improvident family was considerably indebted to his generosity. Their financial position seems to have deteriorated rapidly, and in 1677 Sir Hugh bought the Preshaw estate from his uncle, and John and Cary with their numerous and unsatisfactory brood moved to London. From this time Hugh's name disappears from the Memoirs.
This autocratic character is borne out by his portrait which hangs at Hinto - a three-quarter length by Thomas Hudson, painted probably about 1700. He is handsomely dressed in a blue coat with a golden silk waistcoat buttoned over a prosperous-looking stomach, but his saturnine face looks out fiercely from the canvas, and his black jowl makes his appearance far from prepossessing. As a portrait, however, it gives the impression that it is a faithful likeness.
I have one other faint contact with Sir Hugh. A few years ago a kind lady gave me a scrapbook which had belonged to her lately deceased father, who lived in a neighbouring village. Seeing references to Hinton in the book, he had always intended to give it to me. On the flyleaf of the book was an inscription in a faded sloping hand written probably in the early nineteenth century saying that the papers pasted into the following pages had been found in the old house at Hinton Ampner when it was let to Mrs. Ricketts in 1765.
At last, I hoped, I was to find some documents which would illuminate the characters of the Stewkeley family - letters from husbands to wives, from fathers to children, anything however trivial of a personal sort. For, though in some ways I feel close to the family, perhaps because the bones of so many of them rest in the vault beneath the chancel of the church less than 100 yards from where I write, yet I know almost nothing of what they were really like. But I was to be disappointed. With one exception the many little manuscripts, some apparently in Hugh Stewkeley's hand, consisted entirely of doggerel verses of a political nature often interlarded with Latin tags, many with a violently 'anti-Popery' trend. Some were obviously sent to him by friends who knew his interest in this subject, and were addressed on the back:
There are also a number of printed broadsheets showing the same sentiments. Nothing is more obscure and tedious than dead polemics, and all I can gain from them on the personal side is that Sir Hugh was keenly interested in politics and a rabid anti-Catholic.
The one exception in the whole scrapbook to these absurd macaronics is one letter of some slight interest written by Lady Stewkeley, giving a number of domestic injunctions, but there is no indication to whom it is addressed. It probably dates from about 1700. After providing a recipe for making, I suppose, a cake or pudding which starts off: 'half a hundred of curence, half a hundred of fine sugar' she passes on to the more absorbing subject of clothes:
Pray will yu do me ye favour to let my tayler take ye lining out of the goune, and make ye goune into a night goun manto [sic] and line it with white satin, and lett him take some of ye blew Lining and put into ye petycote to make it fuller. . . . Pray send me somthing to cover a pair of morning stays and silk enough to make ye child a cote.
There is a good deal more in this style before she passes on to order a few things for the house:
Som pieces small and long and midell sices, green bays for ye window curtins in ye parlor and curtain rings both bras and horn, ye cases for my bedpost, a pare of lased shoes and one pare of slipers for my self. Mrs. Stewkeley [her daughter presumably] would have her sleeves mad fatinable if ye can, and a new fationed hood or quaif which is most worne.
This long list of orders must have come from the second Lady Stewkeley who was clearly a practical and domestic type, very different from the first sharer of Sir Hugh's bed who was (refined above the present age'. On 19th July 1719 Sir Hugh died at the mature age of 81 and was buried at Hinton. He had lived in six reigns as well as through the years of the Commonwealth and so had experienced some of the most dramatic events in the history of this country. He had had eight children, two sons and two daughters by his first wife, four daughters by his second. Of these there survived at his death only the four daughters of the second marriage. His daughter Katherine, of the first, had married at Hinton in 1679 Sir Charles Shuckburgh, but had died four years later leaving a son and two daughters. Stewkeley sons were not favoured with long life, for John Stewkeley's two sons had also died early, so that in the male line the family ended with Sir Hugh.
The lack of male heirs was at least of benefit to his daughters who were well provided for in their father's will. The property of Laverstoke had already gone to the Shuckburgh family, and the grandson Sir John Shuckburgh is left only a token £100, with like sums to other Shuckburgh grandchildren. All Sir Hugh's properties in Hampshire and Somerset were held in trust for his daughter Mary, who just before her father's death had married Edward Stawell, of whom more will be said in the following chapter, while the three younger daughters were left £5,000 apiece 'if and when they marry with the consent of my wife'. Sarah, the second, married suitably and no doubt received her bequest firstly to George Townsend, of Donington in Gloucestershire, and secondly to Ellis St. John, of Dogmersfield in Hampshire. Honoria, the fourth, never married so presumably remained dependent on her family, but Betty, the third, made a marriage which must have considerably lowered the prestige of the family. A year after her father's death she married one William Blake, who had been Sir Hugh's groom. The proviso in the will may indicate that Sir Hugh had some suspicion of this romance. In any case Betty appears to have received her mother's consent, and with it the £5,000 without which they would have been in penury. Happiness, if indeed it was happiness, was not of long duration for after three years of marriage Betty Blake died at the age of 37 and six years later William, who was 12 years her senior died as well. By his will he left not only money for the fine monument to his wife and himself in the church at Weeke, near Winchester, but also a fair sum for the building and endowing of a free school at Hinton. His assets having come from Hinton, he no doubt thought they should return there. The school, with nineteenth-century additions, is still the Primary School for the children of Hinton and Bramdean. The Stewkeley family have long since faded into the mists, but the fruits of the misalliance live on and have brought benefits to many generations of children of the locality.