Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 1 Buildings and People of a Rutland Manor LYDDINGTON, CALDECOTT, STOKE DRY AND THORPE BY WATER Rosemary Canadine ● Vanessa Doe ● Nick Hill Robert Ovens ● Christopher Thornton LYDDINGTON MANOR HISTORY SOCIETY Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 2 Buildings and People of a Rutland Manor: Lyddington, Caldecott, Stoke Dry and Thorpe by Water Published in 2015 by Lyddington Manor History Society, 22 Main Street, Lyddington, Oakham, Rutland LE15 9LT www.lyddingtonhistory.org.uk The Society is grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a generous grant towards the cost of researching and producing this publication. Copyright © Lyddington Manor History Society 2015. ISBN 978-0-9934821-0-6 The rights of the individual authors have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1993. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the Lyddington Manor History Society. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Designed by Peter Ling. Printed and bound in Malta by Gutenberg Press Ltd. Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 3 Figure 1 The Lyddington Manor Project study area. (Robert Ovens) Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 4 Maps of the villages in the Project Study Area (Based on the Ordnance Survey Series 1 Map of 1886) Figure 2 Lyddington (North). (RCM) 4 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 5 Figure 3 Lyddington (South). (RCM) 5 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 6 Figure 4 Caldecott. (RCM) 6 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 7 Figure 5 Stoke Dry. (RCM) Figure 6 Thorpe by Water. (RCM) Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 8 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 9 Contents Acknowledgements 11 Foreword – by Miranda Rock, Burghley House Preservation Trust 12 Introduction – by Rosemary Canadine 13 Section 1 The Manor in the Middle Ages – by Christopher Thornton 17 Section 2 Social and Economic History 1550–1800– by Vanessa Doe 35 PART 1 Topography 37 PART 2 Community 51 PART 3 Farming 67 PART 4 Manor and Parish 85 PART 5 Transport and Trade – with Eric Moss 95 Section 3 Vernacular Buildings – by Nick Hill and Robert Ovens 107 PART 1 Introduction 109 PART 2 Medieval 111 PART 3 Seventeenth Century 123 PART 4 Eighteenth Century 179 PART 5 Nineteenth Century 201 PART 6 Tree-Ring Dating – by Robert Howard and Nick Hill 205 Section 4 House Histories – by Rosemary Canadine 213 PART 1 Introduction 215 PART 2 Caldecott 223 PART 3 Stoke Dry 267 PART 4 Lyddington 275 PART 5 Thorpe by Water – by Vanessa Doe 337 PART 6 Conclusions 343 Section 5 Afterword – by Rosemary Canadine 347 Abbreviations 351 Glossary 359 Notes 352 Indexes Bibliography Index of Maps 361 Manuscript Sources 356 Index of Places 361 Printed Sources 357 Index of Surnames, People, Organisations and Corporate Bodies 361 Index of Buildings 364 General Index 366 9 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 10 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 11 Acknowledgements Lyddington Manor History Society would like to thank: Many local residents, for giving access to and providing deeds and photographs of their houses; The National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund for financial support and, in particular, Sarah Clurow and Laura Summers, our Grant Officers, for their advice and support; Miranda Rock, House Director, and Jon Culverhouse, Curator, Burghley House Preservation Trust, for giving free access to the Exeter archive at Burghley House for this project; English Heritage, for support and access to their reports on Lyddington Bede House; Dr Christopher Thornton, for advice and support throughout the project in his role as mentor; Dr Robert Howard of Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory, for advice and for tree-ring dating services; Caldecott History Society, The Institute of Historical Research Library at the University of London, Lincolnshire Archives Office, Monumental Brass Society, Northampton- shire Record Office, Rutland County Museum, Rutland Local History and Record Society, the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, and The National Archives, for help and support; Professor Michael Jones, Dr David Crook and, from Langham Village History Group, Anthony Wright and Mike Frisby, for advice in setting up the project; Richard Gilbert of Leicester University for help in indexing property transactions in sixteenth and seventeenth-century court rolls; Professor Alan Rogers for help and advice; Dr Nat Alcock, for advice on documentary research; Hilary Crowden for advice on information sources; Dr Clive Jones for advice on local geology; Dennis Wright and Chris Race, former residents of Caldecott, and Doug and Joan Clarke, the late Hugh Clarke and Roger Hickenbotham of Lyddington, for access to their collections of local historic information and photographs; Michael Webb of Langham and Peter Lane of Uppingham for local historic information; Catherine Murray for use of her original notebooks from the local listed building re-survey of 1985; Stephen McKibbin of MCWebs, for advice and the design, construction and maintenance of the Society website, www.lyddingtonhistory.org.uk. IMAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All photographs, maps and drawings are by the respective authors unless otherwise acknowledged. 11 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 12 12 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 13 Introduction his book is the culmination of a four-year project on buildings and Ttheir occupants in the Manor of Lyddington. It has focussed on the ordinary village houses and farm buildings, which have never been studied in detail before, rather than churches or the Bede House. So why and how did we undertake the project? It all began in 2009 when I met Dr Christopher Thornton, a historian from Essex, and Robert Howard of Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory. Chris had been appointed by English Heritage to look into the history of Lyddington Bede House and Robert to assess its potential for a programme of tree-ring dating. Lyddington Bede House, formerly a palace of the bishops of Lincoln, is one of the major secular monuments of the Midlands and has been under the guardianship of English Heritage since 1984. When Chris arrived in the village the custodian pointed him to my door. We sat down at my kitchen table and discussed the questions he had been given. Chris subsequently drew on my archive of material, did his own extensive research and we twice visited Burghley House together. We got to know one another well. Robert Howard told me that when he first visited Lyddington, he was immediately struck by the number of old buildings in the village. No tree-ring dating had ever been done here and Robert approached me asking if there was any potential for this. He wanted to know if any local history or survey projects were being undertaken or whether any keen locals might be interested in starting one. He raised the question of funding. Perhaps, he thought, we might secure a grant from a Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and local authority combination or even from private individuals who wanted to know how old their house was. He said that the Tree-ring Dating Laboratory had recently finished such a project in the village of Norwell, in Nottinghamshire. It had gone well and another similar project had started in Wiltshire. Robert explained that dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is used to produce a date when the timbers used in a building were felled. As timbers were used ‘green’, within a year or two of felling, the process can provide very accurate dates for the construction of buildings studied. Very little such dating has been carried out in Rutland, particularly for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the apparent date of many of the village buildings. Robert said that, if it could be combined with a survey of the buildings, it would enable a scien- tifically-based chronology to be built up for the local houses and their features. Also, Lyddington was evidently an important place in medieval times, with the former bishop’s palace, and it might well be possible to discover houses pre-dating 1600, of which very few were known. The other compelling reason for undertaking such a project in Lyddington was the extent of the documentary evidence available. Manor court rolls and rentals for the Manor of Lyddington with Caldecott dating from the later 13 Lyddington masterrev.qxp_Layout 1 14/12/2015 12:27 Page 14 INTRODUCTION fifteenth century are all held at Burghley House, where I am archivist. I had catalogued them but because I had concentrated in my own researches on the medieval history of the Manor, these remained largely untapped. I approached the curator and was given permission to scan and make publicly available all the documents I could find in the archive that pertained to the Manor. There were a huge number and I knew that deciphering them and collating the information they contained would be a very big task but, together with the dendrochronology, they offered the rare and exciting possibility of recon- structing the history of every property in the Manor. The potential was enormous and could lead to an understanding of the social and economic development of the post-Reformation Manor. Professor Michael Jones and his wife, Elizabeth, who ran a similar Heritage Lottery funded project in Norwell, provided advice and ideas about undertaking such a project.