Hinton House

An attempt to trace the history of Hinton Grange to the present Hinton House by Isla Tuck

Author’s note, October 2014:

I first visited Hinton House when I was three months old in 1930. During many subsequent visits my great aunts, the three Miss Foxcrofts, caught my interest with stories about the house and those who had lived there. Later the house was my home for a number of years and its history continued to intrigue me. Over time I have been able to discover more through visits to record offices and from the many documents that had survived in Hinton House. Writing this account was rather like a detective story. The Somerset Record Society’s ‘Surveys of Hinton Charterhouse and Norton St. Philip from 1535-1660’ has allowed me to trace the house and its site in more detail and as I put the facts together there were twists and turns – and more may emerge in the future.

This somewhat rambling account does not pretend to be more than a first effort at piecing together the various references to the site together with family memories. To that, I have added some stories that have been handed down – how truthfully they have travelled I leave it to the reader to decide.

I have added a brief bibliography and notes on my resources at the end. Any inaccuracies or mistakes are entirely my own.

1239-1625 Crown Lands

The site of Hinton House has its beginnings long ago. In 1226 the Carthusian Order was given the manors of Hinton Charterhouse and Norton St. Philip by Ela Countess of Salisbury. A manor was an estate and the manor of Hinton included most of the land within the present parish of Hinton. Central to the manor was the manor house where either the owner or his tenant lived. The Priory was built by 1232 and it is believed that the original site of the Salisbury’s manor house became its grange, the agricultural heart of the monks’ estate. Sometime during the Salisburys’ ownership a deer park had been created just to the north of the manor house and this large walled area was ideal for the Carthusians who sought complete seclusion. The surroundings were more wooded than they are today and there was no A36. The field between the Priory and the Branch Road is still called ‘Ridings’ – a ride being a track through a wood. It is likely that the local population would have had very limited access to the Priory and women were strictly forbidden. In the early years the Lay Brothers had their own quarters in Friary wood and would have worked the land with villagers who were bound to work a certain number of days for their lord, but later, certainly after the Black Death in 1348 or maybe earlier both Lay Brothers and other labour became scarcer and the farms were let.

In 1993 the Somerset Vernacular Building Research Group was invited to look at the house and in their report noted the remains of thick walls in the cellar not aligned to the present building which suggested an earlier structure – was this an earlier farm building or could it have possibly been the original manor house? A manor house and a church indicate a village. Traditionally it is said that a village green lay in the present park, east of the church, the boundary running up beside Green Lane to the turning to New Town.

Until the mid-1820s records show that there was still a cottage on an old road that then ran from Green Lane between the church and the Grange (Hinton House) across to the old road to Freshford, now the Branch Road (see map). Walking along the present public footpath from the end of the churchyard to the Branch Road one can sometimes see the line of this old road in the grass in front of the east side of the house.

There is one brief glimpse into the working of the Grange in the very last days of the monks. When Henry VIII’s surveyors recorded the annual income of the newly acquired land in 1539, part of the first year fell in the time of the last prior, Prior Horde, who in 1538 had let half the Grange to Lord Hungerford for a monetary rent while the other half was leased to Richard Treherne or Davis with part of his rent being paid in kind to support the monks. This was made up of the following:

40 quarters of wheat £13. 6s 8d
60 quarters of barley £8
5 quarters of ‘lez dregge’ 13s 4d (mixed grains sown and harvested together).
5 quarter of oats £2 6d
4 cart loads of hay 8s
4 cart loads of straw at 2s 8d
221 gallons of milk at 1d a gallon to be paid for when required

The monks’ simple diet consisted of bread and vegetables with occasional cheese and eggs with fish from their fish ponds. The hay and straw suggest they may have had some livestock at the Priory itself. The Grange survived the destruction suffered by the Priory and just three years later in 1542, John Leyland, the Tudor scholar and traveller, passed through Hinton on his way to Bath and recorded seeing ‘a graung, great and well builded, that longed to Henton Priory of Carthusians’

Immediately after the monks had left in 1539 Lord Hungerford petitioned to buy both the Priory and the Grange but only succeeded in buying the site of the Priory, although his lease from the Prior of a moiety of the Grange continued. However, the following year his misdeeds and the King’s displeasure led to his beheading beside Thomas Cromwell on Tower Hill and all his lands were forfeited to the Crown.

After Lord Hungerford’s demise, his lease of half the Grange was taken over by Sir Henry Longe. This expired in 1561 and was taken on by Richard Treherne or Davis for a further 21 years in addition to the half he already held. Eventually, the Hungerford lands were restored and the family was able to rent the Grange and its lands which then amounted to over 1,000 acres – roughly half the area of the whole of Hinton’s land. Over the years the Manor of Hinton was let and sub-let by the Crown and even mortgaged by Queen Elizabeth at one period when the costs of the Spanish wars were high.

The arable farmland in Hinton was, as in the Feudal age, divided between two large areas, the South Field which stretched from the present road to Norton St. Philip westwards to Tait Wood and around to Tuggy’s Lane, while the boundary of the North Field appears to have run from Wellow Lane, north-west towards the Wellow Brook and continued just to the edge of Midford. From there it followed roughly the line of the Bath road back to the village.

(It is less clear where the exact boundaries lay in the North Field.) This field would surely have been more difficult to plough as it is largely on the side of the valley. Other land is described as pasture (for grazing) or mead (for hay, etc.). The big open fields would have been ploughed in long strips by teams of oxen.

In April 1582 Sir Walter Hungerford leased Henry Story his house on the Priory site for 21 years. This was the house that had been built from the ruins of the Carthusians’ Priory and belonged to the Hungerfords, rather than the Crown. It is described in the Hungerford rent records as:

All that capitall mesuage or mansyon house with the backside pigeon house garden and orchard thereto adjoyning cont. in all by est iiij acres which is a feyre house for a gent to dwell in all covered with slatte with courtes gardens and orchard very orderly and it inclosed with a stone walle

At the same time Story rented one hundred and twenty acres in both the North and South fields that belonged to the Grange. Under this lease, he was bound to sow sixty acres of wheat and sixty acres of barley and from this must deliver as his rent, the ‘thurds and tenths’ to the landlord’s barn or rick yard. The third was the amount Hungerford paid for his lease from the Crown and the tenth was his profit. These together were estimated at £40 a year. Other meads and pastures Story paid for in money. A lease granted to Thomas Flower in 1577 for the mill at Midford bound him to grind any corn sent to him by his landlord and in addition, it was his duty to feed the pigeons all year round in the Lord’s pigeon houses. These conditions may well have been similar to those operating in the days of the Carthusians.

Sometime in the following years Thomas Flower moved to the Grange but had left by 1589 when Henry Story took on a 21-year lease for the whole farm and its land. The Grange itself is described as:

The tenement or Farme house called Henton Graunge which was in the tenure of Thomas Flower with the garden & orchard adjoining the old barne the South end of the oxehouse belonging to the Graunge cont. ii feilds the old Kytchen and a Dovehouse late in the tenure of the said Sir Walter……

At first sight, this would seem to be a very different house as opposed to the Priory, The description suggests a farmhouse and not a mansion for ‘a gent to dwell in’ but these leases were copied by clerks sometime after they were granted and occasionally errors occur. This one seems particularly unclear and the ‘ii feilds’ is probably a misreading of the word ‘fild’ which was a local word for ‘bay’ and denotes the size of a building (see following survey). This seems likely as the lease also includes a long list of ‘feilds’ by name and the ‘ii feilds’ in the description of the buildings make little sense. The list of buildings itself is hard to follow and may not be fully accurate. Although this lease does not appear to describe a large house it is unlikely that the ancient well-built grange that Leyland had seen nearly fifty years earlier had disappeared, although it may have fallen into disrepair.

John Hercy’s survey for the Crown in 1606 refers to a Hungerford lease for the Grange granted to three farmers Kellaway, Byrd and Bright in 1598 just nine years after Henry Story had taken it on and the description is now very different. The survey describes it thus:

One Mansion howse with 14 fild 2 barnes 12 fild an Oxe howse and stable 10 fild 3 Sheephowes 26 fild one dove house 3 fild and a garden and one orchard (in all) 6 acres.

Instead of the ‘old barne’ and the ‘old Kytchen’ here is a very large mansion house, bigger than any other farmhouse in either Hinton or Norton with a much bigger farm complex. A ‘fild’ or bay was the distance between the upright posts holding up the roof and one reference suggests this was the width of a cart or waggon but no doubt there was some variation. A visit to the Tithe barn in Bradford-on-Avon which also has 14 bays suggests the possible size of the house.

It is the largest house recorded in Hercy’s survey of the two villages except for the George Inn in Norton St. Philip which has 20 bays. Perhaps whatever was there earlier had been repaired and new farm buildings added but if this house had in fact been built by the Carthusians a number of speculations arise. It was said by Miss Helen Foxcroft who lived in Hinton House that she had been told that the ‘monks had used the Grange for sick monks’ but never gave any reason for believing this. Alternatively, it could have been used by the Lay Brothers although, by the time of the Dissolution, it was let. At present we can only guess.

The Hungerford’s big house at the Priory is not included in the survey and may have been of a similar size. This survey of Hinton describes one farmhouse of nine bays but the average dwelling is between three and five with a number of only two bays.

The church registers show that Sir Antonie Hungerford ‘Captaine within the Realme of Ireland’ was buried on 29th May 1594 in the chancel on the south side of the altar in St. John’s Parish Church. As he was the only Hungerford to be buried in Hinton, it has been assumed he was living in the Hungerfords’ Priory house. Is it too far-fetched to suggest that Henry Story moved to the Grange so that Sir Anthonie could retire to the Priory? Story’s lease for the Grange was for twenty-one years but it was re-let just nine years later. Although the church records go back a long way, some years in the 1590s are missing and although a number of Storys are mentioned there is no record of Henry Story’s death.

In the succeeding reign of James I several tenants held the Grange and the situation is somewhat confused. John Norden who surveyed the royal manors in 1610 and on several further occasions over the next few years, bewails the inadequacy of the supervision in many of them. He notes there are often no stewards to assist him; in Hinton he finds fallen walls and good timber being abused. Local inhabitants fail to disclose their deeds and records and he reports his difficulties:

The Manor they say is held by My Lord Rutland for lives, who or what they are unknown to me. Who is lying or not or how his Lordship holds the woods doth not appear necessary to know.

On a later occasion, he writes:

One Wrighte the present farmer (of the Grange) fells yearlie many timber trees. The beste okes about the farme without number, without seeming necessitie or assignment, not fitt to be suffered, he takes also the lopps and barke…..

Lack of local oversight and perhaps a distrust of those authorities investigating the leases made things difficult for the King’s surveyors. By this time the Duke of Rutland leased the properties from the Crown – inherited by his late wife who had been a Hungerford widow – and there appears to have been little local management. This 1610 survey was to determine which of the manors might be sold and which best be kept to provide an income for the households of James’s sons, first Prince Henry and later, after his early death, Prince Charles. At the time Hinton and Norton were two of the manors reserved for the Princes’ use. However when Prince Charles became king in1625 he too found himself short of funds due to the intransience of Parliament and from 1630 onwards he sold more royal lands including both manors of Hinton and Norton.

Private and Parliamentary Ownership As Landlords 1625-1682

These two manors were purchased by Lord Craven, a wealthy royalist who during the following years spent his time abroad in the service of Elizabeth of Bohemia (sister of Charles I and mother of Prince Rupert). In 1639 his agent, Samuel Parsons, who lived locally, made a survey of both villages, which, although it never reached Craven, luckily survived in Parsons’ family in Norton St. Philip and was bought by Miss Helen. Foxcroft of Hinton House in the years between the wars. It is now in the Somerset Record Office. In his survey Parsons describes the Grange as:

A large auncient well built house where in at this tyme two farmers or tenants dwell, with very spacios large barnes, shepe houses, stables, staules, pigion house, with orchard, gardens and the court or barton (farm yard)containing 6a-3r-15p.

Here it is described as an ‘ancient well-built house’ – which seems to confirm that the grange is at least based on the original buildings. Parsons comments on the poor state of the farm lands and accuses the farmers, both called Wickham, of bartering wood in exchange for what they claim to be necessities for themselves and the farm. At this time the Grange farm had over 800 acres of arable land in the open fields, as well as pasture and meadow land but as Parsons writes:

‘both the pasture and earrable land would be much ymproved if the tenants were sufficient and able men fully to stock and manage the same, but they are poore and live upon the spoyle and wast of wood & tymber and none looks after them.’

Parson’s survey confirms much of what Norden had noted nearly thirty years earlier. These surveys emphasize the importance and value of wood as a commodity essential for day-to-day necessities of life and nationally for house and shipbuilding. In spite of Parson’s disparaging remarks regarding the Wickhams, one at least seems to have had local authority as the following incident in 1630 indicates. With the economy in a very poor state, poor harvests, disease and a consequent shortage of food, a mob of around a hundred local people tried to storm a train of waggons on Midford Hill. The waggons were loaded with corn on their way from Trowbridge to Bristol. Grain was in very short supply and it had been decreed that nothing was to be moved without magistrates’ permission. These particular loads had such permission but the people were desperate. The episode led to a government investigation which in its findings records how Mr Wickham was able to disperse the mob and allow the waggons to continue.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Lord Craven was deemed to be a ‘delinquent’ although he was living in the Low Counties and took no part in it himself. His representatives in England argued to retain the property but eventually, under an Act of Parliament of 1652 his lands were seized by the Commonwealth and yet another survey was carried out. This was far more detailed than Parson’s survey and gives a picture of a very large working farm which may well have still suffered from the shortage of labour and investment noted by Parsons. By now William Mullins was the tenant and the survey shows that he was farming rather less arable land than the Wickhams had struggled with. The Grange itself with ‘two kitchings’ may have still been divided in two as it was when the Wickhams had been the farmers.

All that Capitall Messauage or Tenement called the Grange House scituated on the North side of the Church…….consisting of an halle, a Parler, two kitchings A Butterye, a great Roome called Storyes halle & A Cellar and alsoe five large Chambers and three little Chambers With a Brew house, a Kilne house, a Dovehouse, A Gatehouse and twoe other decayed Roomes all built of rough stones & covered with Slates and allsoe twoe Barnes consisting twelve Bayes of building with a Stabell and an Oxe house of 11 bayes & a cart house built of stone’.

Here we get the first internal description of the Grange House and the only mention of a gatehouse – clearly a substantial complex but with a suggestion of deterioration with the two ‘decayed rooms’. The farm buildings are much the same size as earlier. There was also a sheep house 120ft in length and 23ft in breadth, two gardens and a large yard, the whole site covering as before over 6 acres. There are possible traces of a sheep house in the parkland to the east of the present house which can be seen when walking along the public footpath mentioned above.

The reference to ‘a great Roome called Storyes halle’ is surely a reference to Henry Storey who leased the Grange over sixty years earlier and suggests he may have added to an existing building, rather than that he built a completely new house.

In March 1653, a year after the Parliamentary survey, all Craven’s property in both Hinton and Norton was sold on behalf of the Commonwealth and John Warre of Westminster negotiated a sale as an investment for five gentlemen living in different parts of England, for the sum of £6,472.12d. How much these changes affected the tenants who worked the land is hard to tell but it may well be that they were minimal and life carried on as usual with no resident landlord.

The Restoration in 1660 saw Charles II on the throne and all land restored to those whose property had been confiscated – presumably, those who had bought it earlier lost their capital investment. However, Lord Craven just three years later in 1663 sold his property in both villages to Lord Edward Hungerford who was already leasing it. Known as the Great Spendthrift, Lord Edward was finally bankrupted in 1684 by his gambling and extravagance at the Court. Most of the land was bought by his son-in-law, Henry Bayntun of Spye Park who then sold it on to a number of different buyers. In Hinton several local people benefited and acquired freehold land; these sales saw the final break-up of the old open fields.

Harding & Day c.1700-1846

As early as 1670 Lord Edward Hungerford had begun to sell land on long 99-year leases for money rather than the earlier twenty-one-year leases sometimes paid for in a mixture of money and kind. This was an opportunity for the newly married John Harding, the only son of a well-to-do clothier from Broughton Gifford to acquire a sizable farming estate. In the early deeds he is referred to as ‘yeoman’ but by the time of his death, he had risen to the status of ‘gentleman’. As a clothier, he would not have been accepted in landed county circles and an ambitious clothier needed either to buy land or marry an heiress to rise socially. So it was in 1670 that this first of three generations of John Hardings bought a 99-year lease from Edward Hungerford for farmland in Norton St. Philip including land at Norwood. For this, according to the lease, he paid the large sum of £700. It is not known where John Harding was living when he and his new family first came to the area but it could have been at Norwood farm or in Norton St. Philip. However, his oldest son, William, was baptised in Hinton parish church in 1672. This John bought another long lease for more land in 1674 and in 1681 he acquired yet another for Hinton Grange itself and the fields surrounding it. Rather surprisingly the farmhouse is described as

“all that newmbuilt house and barne thereto adjoining.”

This statement does not seem to refer to the previous house but to a new house attached to one of the two barns.

During a very dry summer in the 1970s, the outline of a large building could clearly be seen on the front lawn by anyone standing on the roof of the present Hinton House. Some amateur excavations revealed walls only a few inches below the surface and a channel which appeared to head east and may have led to the spring between the house and the church from which, in Victorian days and perhaps earlier, drinking water was drawn from a pump. Could this be the site of the old Grange House originally built by the Carthusians? A geophysical scan of the front lawn might provide some answers.

John Harding I died in 1683 not long after this lease of the house and left his capable wife, Hannah, daughter of a successful clothier herself, with seven children under 15. His grave slab lies in the floor of the tower in the parish church and also commemorates the death of a young daughter, Catherine, and uses the old alternative spelling of Harden. Under his will, his oldest son, William, inherited all the freehold family property in Broughton Gifford, while he left his second son, John II the leasehold property in Hinton and Norton. However, after her husband’s death, his widow managed to acquire the freehold of most of the Hinton/Norton land from Lord Hungerford and Bayntun while John II was still underage. His mother had sent him to London to train as a lawyer in Symons Inn and while in London he married Hannah Dowley, the daughter of a member of the Fishmonger’s Company.

The young couple appears to have returned to Hinton in 1701 or 2 and it was during the following years that John Harding II, never a farmer and trained as a lawyer, appears to have built the present house in and around a barn – presumably to which the ‘new built’ house of 1681 was attached. On the south end of the barn, he added the present south front of two rooms on both the ground and first floors. This addition was wider than the end of the barn and formed a wing on the east side of the house which was balanced by a similar additional wing consisting of a room with a bedroom above. Thus with a central doorway, an empty E-shaped east frontage was created. The wall between the two wings was rebuilt or altered so that the barn itself disappeared from view although still remaining in the centre of the whole structure. The south front of the house would have looked much the same as today and the east front, seen in the sketch painted in the 1830s, is probably much how it looked at the time it was changed more than a hundred years earlier. Was the ‘new built house’ incorporated into these developments or was it pulled down? Interestingly the SVBRG inspection in 1990 noted that it appeared that there had been another building, joined to the north end of the present house where the barn ends, although only remnants of beams, etc. can be seen in the present wall. However, Harding’s main additions were added to the south end of the barn and this perhaps suggests that ‘the new built house’ was added to that end. Examining the present house plan there is an internal gap between the south end of the barn and Harding’s added rooms which might suggest this option.

Little is known of the inside of the house at that time but with the south front addition of two reception rooms with bedrooms above and the east front adding a library and bedroom, it is likely that John Harding II made alterations to the interior of the barn itself. Confirmation of the barn within the house was discovered during alterations in 1887 when a pintle was discovered in a first-floor wall (‘a pin or bolt on which something turns, as a hinge’) and in 1949 and 1951 during the laying of electrical cables the other three came to light, directly above one another in the walls on the ground and first floor, giving a clear indication where the two big doors would have hung in the centre of the west side of the barn. The opposite entrance in the east wall has disappeared in the rebuilding. This barn conversion had taken a major step towards the site becoming a gentleman’s residence rather than a working farm. It was probably John Harding II who planted the cedar tree that grew to be a memorable feature on the lawn until its demise in the 1970’s. Over the years many groups and tea parties were photographed beneath its wide branches.

When young John II and his wife returned to the house in 1701, his mother and youngest brother, Thomas, still only 19 or 20 moved to Iford where they leased a house that then stood in what is now the walled garden of Iford Manor. The house had access to the river for the processing of wool and Thomas became a successful clothier, later described as ‘of Westwood and Holt’. It was his granddaughters who were eventually to inherit the building that was now becoming Hinton House. In 1706 John II bought the then valuable property of Norton Fair which his descendants were to keep until the fair diminished in importance and the rent of stalls etc. was reduced to a pittance by the late 19th century. Many of the early rent books recording payments for the fair stalls were among the papers from Hinton House now in the Somerset Record Office. Thomas Harding features as a stallholder in these selling his cloth.

In 1723 John Harding II died and was succeeded by his only surviving child, John Harding III. His grandmother, Hannah Harding, very much the family matriarch, wrote her will a few years later in 1728, shortly before she died at the age of 79. In this, she mentions all her surviving descendants. She was still based in the house at Iford with her son Thomas and his children, William and Catherine, but had various possessions in her grandson John III’s house, described as in Norton, and also in Hinton House itself where his widowed mother was still living. In what appears to be a somewhat vindictive will, John II had left his wife a life interest in another house in Hinton with a number of restraints; one being that she would lose all rights to this house if she dug up or altered the garden in any way! It seems however that their son had settled in Norton and waited until his mother’s death to move back to Hinton House.

John Harding III finally confirmed the family’s social standing, becoming a J.P. and High Sheriff for Somerset in 1751. Two years later he married at the age of 51, twenty-four-year-old Anne, the daughter of his first cousin George Hodge. No doubt he hoped for an heir but they had no children and he died in 1761 never having made a will. During his lifetime his uncle, William Harding, who as mentioned earlier, had inherited the Broughton Gifford property on the death of his father in 1682, died unmarried and his property had eventually passed to John III. For some reason, John III’s widow, Anne, did not remain at Hinton House but lived in the house in Broughton Gifford. Under intestacy laws, she would have had a strong claim on her husband’s estate and it may be that it was only after her death that the two young women, Catherine and Mary Jacob, granddaughters of Thomas of Iford, inherited as joint heiresses. Thomas’s son, William, had predeceased John III and Thomas’s granddaughters were the children of his daughter, Catharine Jacob. The elder sister, Catherine, married three times but had no children and her share of the property eventually ended up in the estate of her third husband who out-lived her. In 1760 a year before John III’s death, she had married her first husband, Mr Anstey, and her marriage settlement included the deeds to the Norton St. Philip Fair, which John III presumably gave to her, perhaps as a wedding gift. However, Mary, the younger sister, barely a year after her cousin’s death, eloped with Stephen Skurrey of Beckington who had been John III’s agent. The evidence for this elopement is on a small sheet of paper found among the records in the House. It reads:

September ye 15th 1762

These are to Certify whom it may Concern that Stephen Skurrey and Mary Jacob were married According to the rubrick of the Church of England by mee.

S.D. Rees Minister of St. Andrew’s Chapel, Edinburgh

This Marriage was solemnis’d in the presence of us

Peter Ramsey
A.Harding

Attached to the document with a pin is the following note in the hand of Stephen Skurrey:

Peter Ramsey kept the Red Lyon Inn near the Cow Gate in Edinburgh and

A Harding was the widow of John Harding Esq., of Charterhouse Hinton in the County of Somerset. Let this be delivered to my Daughter Mary Skurrey.
Stephen Skurrey

In 1762 the Cow Gate was a poor and run-down area that was shortly to be redeveloped. Present research has not discovered St. Andrew’s Chapel and it may have disappeared in the subsequent rebuilding of the area.

It seems likely that there were family objections to Stephen as a husband for a girl with expectations. Stephen Skurrey would surely have known of Mary’s inheritance as both he and his father before him had been employed by John III, looking after his interests and collecting the Norton Fair rents each year. There had been continual disputes over the Fair with others who wished to share in the stall rents and Stephen Skurrey had been very much involved in this on behalf of his employer. An intriguing story – and there are many questions left unanswered, not least the willingness of recently widowed Anne Harding to support her young relative. On their return to Somerset, the couple settled in Beckington and in 1765 Mary Skurrey gave birth to their only child Mary who was to play an important part in the history of Hinton House.

After the death of John III the house was let for over twenty years. With female joint heiresses both married with their own homes, letting the house was likely to have been the best option as the revenue from the estate could be fairly divided. It was during this period that an advertisement appeared in The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette for Thursday 16 April 1778, advertising a Capital Mansion House situated in Charterhouse Hinton, lately occupied by Richard Salter Esq. It goes on to describe the accommodation:

….a hall, three parlours, a tenants hall, two kitchens, eleven-bed chambers, two garrets, a brew house, and other offices; two coach houses, stabling for fifteen horses, with two acres of garden ground walled around and stocked with fruit trees, also twenty acres of pasture ground, tythe free.

Anyone interested in renting the property was asked to apply to either Captain Hay of Westwood (Catherine’s 3rd husband) or Stephen Skurrey of Beckington; and for a sight of the property those interested should apply to the gardener, William West. The advertisement mentions a walled kitchen garden which presumably had been built either by John II or III.

The advertisement also describes the house as being only 200 yards from the main road to towns to the south and that the ‘Salisbury, Southampton and Weymouth Machines pass by there several times in a week’. These were the stage and mail coaches that stopped at the Rose and Crown. The turnpike road from Bath to Warminster, which still runs through Hinton and Norton had been built in 1752 and connected with roads going south. The stabling for fifteen horses seems excessive and suggests that many of the big farm buildings were still standing as it does not relate to the present stables. One explanation could be that the oxen stalls described earlier and which were no longer needed had been converted into stabling now that the Grange had become a private house. The eleven-bed chambers would seem to confirm that John Harding II had built more than the south and east fronts of the house.

In 1786 Mary and Stephen Skurrey’s daughter, Mary, married Samuel Day of Burnett, near Keynsham. Samuel Day’s family seems to have had mercantile connections with Bristol but his property in Burnett was only ‘life land’ which was at an end and after the wedding, the young couple took up residence in Hinton House, either immediately after their marriage or more probably some years later perhaps when they acquired the other half of the estate from Captain Hay, or when a lease expired. Their son, Samuel Skurrey Day, was born in 1787 and later a daughter, Mary.

Samuel senior left his son his collection of fossils and this interest was probably due to the family’s connection with William Smith. Known as ‘the father of geology’, he had been working on the coal cannel in the Midford Valley around the time of the meeting in the Flower de Luce and was likely to have been the ‘William Smith’ who was one of the signatories of the Resolutions. He had also identified an area in Hinton on the Day’s land which is now an SSSI.

Sam junior was a very early member of the Geological Society, founded in 1807. However, the young man had a ‘bad press’ with succeeding generations and was said to have been unpopular locally. It is likely he had been spoiled by his mother, and with his father’s death there was no one to check on him. His friend, Thomas Jones, (of whom later) had been a steadying influence at Magdalen College, Oxford and had rescued him from some serious scrapes. (Thomas Jones himself had also enjoyed life as a young man – an excellent whip he often took the reins on the stagecoach when travelling to or from London).

In 1810 at the age of twenty-three Sam married the Hon. Catherine Lister whom he is said to have met at a Bath Assembly. She was the daughter of Lord Ribblesdale from a Yorkshire family and was only seventeen. Perhaps it was then, when his mother handed over his inheritance on his marriage, that he embarked on his remodelling of the house. However, the marriage did not last long as they were ill-suited and his drinking caused problems. After several failed attempts, Catherine and her maid managed to take a carriage, secretly ordered to wait at the Rose and Crown and were on their way back to Yorkshire.

It was during his brief marriage that Sam Day saw the road to Freshford moved further from the house. The oldest records show it running between the house and the walled kitchen garden, very near to the back of the house but a plan of 1812 shows it passing below the present stables and kitchen garden before re-joining the road to Freshford. The cottage by the kitchen garden was originally built as the lodge at this new entrance to a drive leading to the then front of the house.

During Sam’s marriage, his mother moved out to Farleigh Hungerford and returned to Hinton House sometime after his wife left. Sam was a Regency man with grand ideas for the house and its land. Although his pockets were not as deep as he would have wished that never seems to have held him back. The old staircase and a number of rooms both on the ground and first floor were demolished and the present large hall was created with the cantilevered stone staircase and a glass dome on the roof. No plans for these alterations have come to light so it is not known what was there before and later 19th-century alterations have added to the puzzle.

Having created a new interior he bought new fashionable furniture typical of the Regency period and large pictures to cover the high walls in the new hall as well as books for his library. He also had plans for the surrounding grounds. He envisaged turning the fields and lane on the east side of the house into a park. Perhaps it was now, having studied Humphrey Repton’s book which was in his library and illustrated fashionable surroundings for a gentleman’s house, that he had two ha-ha dug – one from the little wood called The Rookery across the fields to the road to Freshford so that fields and woodland beyond, which belonged to the Abbey (Priory) would appear to be part of the new park and another part way round the church so that no wall or fence spoiled the picturesque view. (Both ha-ha were filled in during the 1960s) It was probably at this time too that Sam was said to have ‘cut down an orchard in full bearing’ – an unforgivable action that led to long-remembered local disapproval. At this time the old village green became part of the park and a number of small closes and meadows which once lay near the church were also included. Sam never finished the work as in September 1816 he was thrown from his horse and killed. It was reported that his wife was seen lurking by the churchyard wall at his funeral – she subsequently married twice more and outliving all three of her husbands, died at a great age.

Sam had made a will leaving everything to his mother, with the verbal request that she should leave the house and land to his good friend Thomas Jones. She took his request to heart and in 1818 wrote to Thomas telling him of her decision to make him her heir. He was the son of a family she knew well. His mother was one of eight Foxcroft sisters from Halsteads in west Yorkshire and the Jones family lived in Stapleton in Bristol. Thomas was a busy lawyer but from the time he became her heir until Mrs Day’s death twenty-eight years later, he was constantly on call to advise and help. Her son had left debts of at least £30,000 and she succeeded in repaying all these during her lifetime, also paying back to the Skurrey side of the family any money she felt had come from her father’s family. She was determined to hand over the estate to Thomas Jones free from encumbrances and in this she succeeded.

From 1820 until a few years before her death Mary Day kept a diary, which although the entries are quite brief builds a picture of her life. A number of her letters also survive showing her as capable and with a sense of humour. It is from her diary we learn that over the years after her son’s death she completed work on the house and grounds. There were things to be finished internally as it was not until 1820 that she wrote ‘fire in the hall for the first time’. In 1828 she had a portico and steps added to her front door. Mrs Day also writes of internal plastering and bookshelves being put up in ‘my library’. In 1825 she notes that her flower garden is finished.

She was a keen hands-on gardener and from time to time she visited nurseries and received cuttings and seeds from friends. In her day the flower garden was smaller with a ha-ha running from the end of the wall beyond the orangery across to the field known as Varmont (many varieties of this name appear in documents over several hundred years and it may have begun as Fairmount). She mentions repairs or alterations to her glasshouse and on one occasion notes she has sent a pineapple to a friend. Difficult to grow in the British climate, this suggests she had a skilful gardener – growing pineapples was an expensive and labour-intensive endeavour. It has recently been recognised that one of the old glass houses had originally been a ‘pinery vinery’ designed to grow both pineapples and grapes. She also records sending oranges and other fruit to friends. An orangery may have already been built but she extended it and the paved path in front of it became known as Madam Day’s Walk. In her younger days, she was often to be seen helping with the haymaking or riding around her fields on Little Adam, her pony.

She was extremely popular and hardly a day passed without someone paying a visit or being entertained to a meal. She herself was frequently dining out in the local villages. She much enjoyed the company of the young and was very friendly with the large Houlton family who lived in Farleigh Hungerford. In 1831 she describes entertaining two young Houltons, Flora and Victor, to syllabub in her root house – another popular garden folly of the time. Some years later in 1838 a ‘tremendous wind in the night’ blew down a wall and pigeon houses outside the library on the east side of the house. Although devoted to her life in ‘dear Hinton’ for many years she took lodgings in Bath in January or February so that she could meet friends, attend balls, the theatre and concerts – and occasional services in the Abbey.

Some summers she visited Weymouth with friends but there is no record of her ever taking a train although on one occasion friends staying at Hinton took the train from Bath to Bristol and ‘were back for tea’. This was just before the GWR line from Bath to London was completed and it was still possible to load your carriage to travel with you.

Although no social reformer she was aware of the needs of the poor and on several occasions visited Bath with Anne, her maid, to buy blankets for those in need she also instituted an annual custom of giving out meat, bread and coal to many Hinton inhabitants. Entry and exit from the house had to be strictly supervised to prevent disputes from arising if one recipient felt her joint was unfairly larger than her neighbours. Coal, from local mines, would arrive at the back of the house in waggons and be distributed by a senior tenant farmer with a list. ( In the bad times in the 1830s, Thomas Jones also sent money for extra coal to be distributed in February). The majority of the recipients were agricultural labourers and their families who would seldom have eaten meat – while attempts to keep warm on a labourer’s wage with often inadequate housing was always a problem for the poor. The distribution took place a few days before Christmas each year and continued with future owners until the outbreak of World War II when rationing brought it to an end.

By 1815 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the old system of parish relief funded by a Poor Rate was becoming under more and more strain as higher numbers of the inhabitants were becoming destitute due to loss of work in the cloth industry and changing agricultural practices. Captain Symonds of the Abbey, who had become a churchwarden a few years earlier, paid a visit to Mrs Day in1820 to tell her that the Church Wardens and members of the Vestry – made up of local farmers, shopkeepers, and tradesmen – had plans to build a Poor House on the piece of glebe land near the church (now the site of the Old School House). She immediately wrote to Thomas Jones to suggest he might like to buy the piece of land in the future! Whatever Thomas may have replied the Poor House was built and was soon occupied as times were hard.

The Captain paid another visit to Mrs Day a few years later with ambitious plans to add a North aisle to the Church and so extend the seating as most of the old box pews were rented to specific families. He was also negotiating to separate the Parish from Norton, to which it had been joined by the Carthusians many years earlier. He would also need to find funds for a stipend for a clergyman for the re-formed parish. This substantial North aisle extension to St. Johns was completed in 1825 with help from the Archbishop’s Fund and Queen Ann’s Bounty and the enlarged church was open again for services by December of that year. However, things had not gone smoothly between Mrs Day and the Captain. As early as the winter of 1820 there is a brief diary entry: ‘Captain Symond’s keeper was impudent to me’, when they met in the wood on the edge of the park. A few years later during the building work in the church Mrs Day locked the gate to the old lane in front of the house. This was the shortest way to ride from the Priory to the church and either Captain Symonds or one of his servants broke the lock to ride through to the church. The gate was locked once more and the gardener was put on guard. Thomas Jones was urgently summoned, as was Colonel Houghton from Farleigh to give her support and advice. It was her land but was there an old right of way across it? Certainly, it seems the Captain felt he was within his rights and sued but nothing seems to have come of it.

The present public footpath is further from the house and one can no longer ride to church from the Priory. It may have been that Mrs Day felt vulnerable as a woman and was determined not to have her position as the leading landowner disregarded. The Captain was a retired army man who had married one of two Humphrey sisters, the last descendants of the Robinson family who had acquired the ‘Abbey’ around the time the Hardings had come to the Grange. Captain Symonds and his wife and daughter all seem to have been of a strict evangelical turn of mind and never entertained or were included in any of the local dinners and outings in which Mary Day participated and so much enjoyed. Although she was good friends with Miss Humphreys – the Captain’s sister-in-law – who often took tea with her, Mrs Day and the Captain would have had little in common and the sight of him riding past her window on a regular basis may have been more than she could stand. With the church now extended and the extra seating in place the new ‘perpetual curate’ arrived in the spring of 1826. He was the Rev. Thomas Spencer, a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

For several years all went smoothly between Mrs Day and Mr Spencer, as she and Thomas Jones had given land and money for the building of the vicarage and the first school. Sadly Thomas Spencer had no tact or social manners. While Mrs Day could have stepped out of one of Jane Austin’s novels, Spencer came from a different world and background. He was a social reformer with strongly held religious views. His family had been Dissenters for several generations, although now Wesleyans, his mother having known John Wesley. He had been brought up in Derby, a forward-looking manufacturing town where new ideas flourished. In many ways, he was eccentric although he did much good in the village.

From a miniature painted in later life. Her diary confirms her curls are not her own

In his early days, Mrs Day often invited him for meals but after several smaller disagreements, they finally fell out once again over locked gates. On this occasion, it was when she locked the gates of her drive onto the High Street as she had ceased using it.

The street was then narrower and there would always have been the inconvenience of meeting a stage or mail coach or other traffic, as her carriage made a sharp turn out of the gate. There may have been some substance in Spencer’s argument that there was an old right of way somewhere along the driveway but it seems doubtful and the quarrel was one as much of personalities as of fact. He saw the closure as a personal affront as he preferred to use the drive ‘as a retired walk to church’ rather than encounter the mud and not infrequently rude inhabitants in the village street.

It was resolved by Spencer being given a key for his own use but it seems they never spoke again although she continued to attend church. She had closed this awkward entrance, no longer needing it, having access to Freshford and Bath via her entrance to the Freshford Road and to Farleigh and Trowbridge through the drive she had recently made across her new park towards Newtown. She had had a lodge built at the entrance to this new drive and pulled down two cottages, known as Tidford cottages on Newtown Lane so that a shortcutting could be made to lead directly from her Lodge to the Farleigh road. Part of her old drive to the High Street then became a footpath from the house to the village, known for many years as the Laurel Walk, it led to the present entrance into Green Lane from the Millennium Green and the cricket field.

On 30th April 1830, Mary Day’s diary entry reads: ‘Captain Symonds buried. Snow on the ground.’ His grave lies to the east of the church near to the north aisle – built just five years earlier through his own energetic endeavours.

The Bristol Riots in 1831 at the time of the Reform Bill frightened everyone, with some 500 dead and half of Queen Square burnt down. Mrs Day hurried home from Weymouth and perhaps because of some local discontent at this time, Spencer and the men of the Vestry stopped the male paupers stone breaking for the Macadams building the A36 – no doubt a job much disliked and which it seems the Vestry feared might cause trouble. Parish pay was reinstated for the paupers and Mrs Day packed up her silverware and sent it to the Bank. This was still an unsettled time in Hinton as well as elsewhere. Only a few years earlier there had been a murder on the hill to Midford and in the previous generation, the last of the male Robinsons at the Priory had ended up in Spire Pond only a few hundred yards from his front door, probably murdered for the Poor Rate money he had been collecting. However, the Bristol violence did not spread to Bath and with the eventual passing of the Reform Bill Mr Jones, as a man, got a vote in Hinton on the strength of a few fields he had bought but as yet no vote for Mary Day or other women.

Mrs Day had introduced Mr Jones to several young ladies without success but in 1835, to her great delight, Thomas Jones, nearing fifty, married Margaret Talbot, granddaughter of Samuel Rodbard of Evercreech, a great friend of both Mrs Day and her late husband. Margaret was the oldest of the twelve children of Sarah Rodbard and James Talbot who had later become Lord Talbot de Malahide, an Irish title. In the following years, the couple had two sons and a daughter, Edward Talbot Day, born in 1837 and Felix and Margaret Ann in the following years. Thomas Jones served on the Bristol City Council for a number of years and in 1841 in his capacity as High Sheriff of the city, he with others went to London to carry Bristol’s congratulations to Queen Victoria on the birth of her first son, (later Edward VII). For many years his court dress worn on this occasion was kept at Hinton House and consisted of a deep plum-coloured coat and breeches and a cream silk waistcoat embroidered with a border of small multi-coloured flowers.

Jones/Foxcroft 1848-1942

In 1846, in her eightieth year, Mrs Mary Day died and her long stewardship of Hinton House came to an end. So at last Thomas Jones, her faithful heir came into his inheritance. He and his wife planned significant alterations to the old house but tragically two years later on the day the builders started the work, he had a stroke and died in his house in Clifton. His widow continued with the work of enlarging the house. She had spent much of her youth in Italy and wanted more spacious reception rooms. The introduction of the large hall had reduced the number of rooms on both the ground and first floors and Thomas and Margaret had planned to move the front door to the south side of the house, where there had been a garden door, and to build two large reception rooms with two bedroom above, on the east side as well as additional servants quarters These additions reduced the light as this did away with four windows on both ground and first floor (including that from which Mr Day’s coffin had fallen) and meant the introduction of more skylights Mrs Day’s portico and steps were put in place at the new front door and the Hon. Margaret Jones with the three young children eventually moved into the renovated house where she spent the rest of her long life.

It was during the 1850s that additional landscaping was needed on the east side of the house. The new rooms had been built over the old driveway and now projected beyond the outline of the old house. It was probably during these years that the Italian Garden was created. This was said to have been a present from Edward and Felix Jones to their mother from a design they saw at the Great Exhibition of 1851. However the boys would have only been 14 and 12 at the time and although it is quite possible they were taken to the Exhibition and saw such a garden with its twenty- eight little flower beds, yew trees, walls and urns, they would have hardly been old enough to pay for its creation. It was during the Hon. Margaret Jones’s stewardship that Mrs Day’s kitchen in the centre of the house was no longer used and became the housekeeper’s room and a new kitchen – or possibly an old one refurbished – was made in a large room to the rear of the house. At one time this had been a separate building as it was outside the shell of the barn. A servants’ hall was built beyond the library against the still-existing barn wall and it was probably then that other domestic offices and store rooms were added around the new large kitchen.

In 1862 the elder son, Edward married Wilhelmina (‘Mina’) Robertson-Glasgow in Scotland and only a few months later his sister, Annie, married Malcolm Fleming Hamilton. For this latter event, her records show that Margaret Jones employed a London firm to decorate the large drawing room. The walls were covered with cream and gold wallpaper panels surrounded with narrow gold moulding and decorated in a Chinese style with bamboo and little birds while the large windows were curtained with red-figured silk. Perhaps it may have been at this time that the cornices were decorated with gold leaf by Italian workmen who had been working at Longleat. The Miss Foxcrofts recalled they had been told that the workman climbed to work with the gold leaf in their pomaded hair. As a child, I was fascinated by this romantic story but have yet to find out what it was based on!

This wedding seems to have been a celebration for everyone – no doubt appreciated in an era without all the entertainment on offer today. The village street was decorated with greenery and flags to celebrate Edward’s recent wedding as well as that of his sister. It was an occasion to introduce both young couples to family, friends and tenants. The local paper described the whole event in glowing terms. There was a tea for the villagers, a marquee for a dinner for the tenant farmers followed by dancing, and indoors more food and dancing in the newly decorated ‘ballroom’ for the bride’s family and friends.

Edward Jones and his new wife rented houses in the area for a number of years while his mother was alive and they did not live in the house until the mid-1870s. In 1865 the family name had been changed to Foxcroft as Edward inherited property in Yorkshire through his Foxcroft/Jones grandmother. He was much interested in local affairs and his responsibilities to his tenants. He worked hard for the village and gave a reading room/coffee house and helped to relocate and build a larger school also adding three local farms to the estate, Stroud, Hinton Farm and Broadfield. He built three cottages and renovated a number of others. A long-time Churchwarden, he supported the church generously, enlarging the vicar’s stipend among other donations. For many years he was Chairman of the Parish Council and he took much interest in wider local affairs becoming a member of the Somerset County Council in the 1880s when local government was reorganized. He was a J.P. and Deputy Lieutenant and held the post of High

Sheriff for Somerset in 1890. He and his wife had two surviving sons, Charles and John as well as five daughters, Helen, Margaret, Mary (Polly), Cecelia (Cissie), and Violet. Their younger son, John, the youngest child, clever and with an Oxford first-class degree, (coached by his eldest sister, Helen), joined the Egyptian Civil Service. Polly had married O.P. Skrine of Warleigh Manor in 1892 – another event enjoyed by the village as well as the House – and spent the early years of her marriage in Canada where her husband farmed in Saskatchewan. Later they moved to Vancouver where their only child, Phyllis Skrine, was born in 1900. In 1904 they returned to England and settled in Bradford-on-Avon.

In 1910 John died in Egypt from typhoid after an appendix operation at the early age of 30 This was a devastating blow for the whole family as he had been a great favourite with everyone. His mother died later that year and Edward followed in 1911, deeply saddened by his wife’s death and that of their son. In memory of Edward Foxcroft his family and many friends gave the four windows depicting Somerset Worthies in the north aisle of the parish church and John and his mother are commemorated in the window on the south wall over the choir stalls. Edward left the property to his only surviving son Charles Talbot Foxcroft., with provision for his spinster daughters. Charles never married and his sisters continued to live with him. Charles had made several attempts to enter Parliament as a member for Frome before the first World War and was eventually successful in 1919 when he became (Conservative) Unionist member for Bath. He continued as an MP except for a short break in 1923, until his death in 1929. All his sisters had been educated at home by their mother and governesses. All were intelligent with Helen Foxcroft being exceptionally clever. She became a writer and an historian. One of her books, ‘Halifax the Trimmer’ (a politician at the time of Queen Anne), became a standard work at Oxford University until the 1960s.

The lack of good marksmen in the British Army in the Boer War in contrast to the Boers had alerted those who saw a European war looming, to the need to have men ready and trained to shoot accurately and in 1906 Helen Foxcroft became secretary and organiser of the Hinton Charterhouse Miniature Rifle Club and also wrote an enthusiastic article for the organisation’s national magazine, The Rifleman; as always signing herself ‘H.C. Foxcroft’ so her sex was undisclosed. The club won the Bath & District Bladud Challenge Cup in 1913, and celebrated with a professional photograph of all members with Miss Foxcroft in the centre beside the cup! Her minutes show the Club continued until 1918. Their indoor shooting range was a disused malt house in the High Street which is now a private house and there was an outdoor range in a field on Tytherley Farm. Helen Foxcroft has also left her account of her aeroplane flight in October 1912. She would have been aware that this new means of transport had military potential. Interested and undaunted, she paid £2.2s. for a flight from the then-new Flying School at Lark Hill on Salisbury Plain, flying in a Bristol side-by-side monoplane at 57 m.p.h. over Stonehenge.

During World War I Helen, Margaret and Cissie Foxcroft all worked as VADs in local Red Cross convalescent hospitals and Charles served in the Somerset Light Infantry. After the war in 1920, Charles gave the barn which was attached to the old Coffee Rooms as a Village Hall in memory of all those in Hinton who had fought in the war.

Between the wars Helen continued her writing, mainly on political subjects and did much of the research for her brother Charlie, supporting him as an MP. She became a JP and was to continue to serve on the Bench throughout World War II, while her sisters were occupied in local and village interests: Margaret and Cissie ran the Sunday School and Margaret started the WI in 1923 and became its first President. She also ran a club for older children which was remembered for years by those attending it. They reorganised the village library and helped to run the usual fetes, Sunday School parties and royal celebrations. There had been alterations to the house over the years when the Foxcroft children were growing up. It was probably then that attics were made into servants’ rooms and two bathrooms were added. At some stage, the room which leads into the orangery and had been a dairy in earlier days became the smoking room – to which those who smoked were ruthlessly banished. Above it, an additional room became Charles’s bedroom. Violet, the family’s long-term invalid, died in 1920 and Charles followed her in January 1929 leaving the property to his three remaining unmarried sisters Helen, Margret and Cecelia Foxcroft.

Later that year in April 1929 Phyllis Skrine the only descendent of Edward Foxcroft’s large family, married her second cousin, Robert Robertson-Glasgow (Bobs), in Hinton’s Parish Church. In the following year regular visits to ‘the aunts’ were made by the Robertson-Glasgows and their growing family – Isla in 1930, Alison in 1932, Robert (Robin) in 1935 and Christal in 1938. Although the House was far from being a farm, the Foxcroft family had three or four Jersey cows for milk, butter and cream and two or three pigs from which hams were made for the household – and a cob to draw the trap which took the laundry to Freshford, (This partial self-sufficiency was probably a long-standing tradition as Mary Day noted sending a cow to Norton Fair in the 1830s). The kitchen garden provided fruit and vegetables and Bath orders was delivered to the door. There was at that time in the 1930’s a household staff of six maids and a cook as well as two gardeners and a boy, an odd-job man/chauffeur and a man who looked after the pigs and cows. An old photograph in the days of the Hon.Margaret Jones shows only slightly larger staff.

With the outbreak of war in 1939 changes came fast. Helen Foxcroft’s diary bewails the difficulty of blacking out the many and differently shaped windows. Evacuees arrived in the village and seven single women from the south coast were found room in the house as well as an elderly couple from London, cousins of the Foxcrofts, and the English Chaplain at the Hague and his wife and daughter. Helen Foxcroft became an air raid warden while Margaret and Cissie helped with organising a rest centre in the school which was much used when Bath was bombed and many came out to local villages for safety. Over the next two years, everyone in the house took turns in fire-watching and most belonged to working parties making socks etc. for the forces. Helen and others made gloves for men on the minesweeper the village had adopted – she describes them as having a string outer cover with a tweed inner lining and letters from the men showed they were much appreciated. The cellar was used for some time to store books from the British Library which it was feared would be bombed.

In September 1941 Margaret Foxcroft died suddenly. She was the practical one and without her and with an ever-decreasing staff Helen and Cissie with great regret decided at the end of 1942 to move to Innox Lodge in the village. This was a painful move for both of them who had known the house for so long. Before it could be let evacuees had to be moved on and much had to be packed up and stored – a difficult proposition in wartime. Hinton House was then let to a Miss Harris who ran it as a naturopathic nursing home from 1943 until it failed in 1948 through a lack of patients.

Robertson-Glasgows 1948-1992

In December 1948 the Robertson-Glasgow family decided to leave St. Andrew’s School in Berkshire, a Prep School ‘Bobs’ Robertson-Glasgow had founded in 1934, and reclaim the house after its years as a nursing home. Sadly the 1862 wallpaper in the drawing room had been destroyed and the house and its heating system were in much need of attention as was the overgrown garden. Rationing was still in force and it was not easy to get materials, etc. The two Miss Foxcrofts were still living in Innox Lodge in the village but Cissie died in the late summer of 1949 and Helen then returned to her beloved home until her death, aged 84, in July the following year. She had many interests and has an entry in the most recent Dictionary of National Biography describing her work.

The Robertson-Glasgows continued to rationalise the house, making three flats at the rear of the building and moving the kitchen back to Mrs Day’s site near the dining room. During the following years a swimming pool and a tennis court were added. The village cricket ground had been in fields some distance from the centre of the village and Mrs Robertson-Glasgow leased a piece of Varmont, the field in front of the house, to the Cricket Club which has continued to flourish.

On the death of Phyllis Robertson-Glasgow in 1971, her son, Robin Robertson-Glasgow inherited the property. After Oxford, he trained at Cirencester Agricultural College and farmed Hinton Farm for a number of years and was involved with the NFU and with many village activities. He married Patricia Neubauer nee Shevlin in 1983 and they were able to update some of the interiors of the house. In 1990 Hinton House supplied yet another High Sheriff when Robin became the High Sheriff of Avon.

In 1992, for the first time in three hundred years, the house and most of the land were sold to Mr and Mrs Alexis Moores who have made their own alterations and improvements in both house and garden – as have so many of those who have lived in the house over the centuries.

There is still more to discover about the buildings on this ancient site. This account is only a beginning.

My grateful thanks to Neil Mattingly for help with the Hungerford Leases, to John Park for sending me the advertisement of Hinton House in 1778 which fills a gap in the story, to Professor Hugh Torrens for correspondence regarding Samuel Day’s patent and Samuel Skurrey Day’s membership of the Geological Society, as well as to the late Dr Mike Aston for conversations about the Friary and the Lay Brothers.

Bibliography

BARNES, Thomas Garden Somerset 1625-1640 A County’s Government During the ‘Personal Rule’, Oxford University Press 1960 page 175 note 2 & 3 SRO Sess rolls 64 pt.ii nos 200-205. The mention of Wickham occurs in The Earl of Marlborough’s investigation.

BRETT, Colin J. The Manors of Norton St Philip and Hinton Charterhouse 1535-1691, Somerset Record Society Vol.93 2007 ISBN 978 0 901732 42 2 – This book is essential for the history of both villages thanks to Colin Brett’s work over many years. I have had to condense some of the information in my account but anyone wanting more detail would find this book fascinating. My account of the Grange could not have been written without its help.

HISTORY OF HINTON CHARTERHOUSE by the Members of the Hinton W.I. – an entry for the Somerset Federation’s competition in 1953 for a Village History – Hinton came 4th – This is invaluable for the older generation’s stories and information which would have been lost but it has certain flaws and needs updating. Duplicated but never printed, several copies exist in Hinton Charterhouse.

Documents Held In Record Offices

Wiltshire & Swindon Record Office:

Hannah Harding’s will & leases related to the Iford house
John Harding III intestacy certificate
Hungerford leases

Somerset Record Office

The Wills of John Harding II, and Mary Day
The Returns for Evacuation to Wales 1803
Other documents relating to the Harding and Foxcroft families
St. John the Baptist Church Registers, Vestry Minutes

Bath City Record Office (Guildhall)

An early will of Mary Day and some family documents

National Archives

The will of John Harding I (Prerogative Court of Canterbury)

Family Archives

Marriage certificate of Stephen Skurrey and Mary Jacob 1762
Volunteer Association Meeting in Norton, May 1798 – Sam Day’s notes.
Mrs Day’s Diary – Some volumes are in the SRO but Wilhelmina Foxcroft’s transcription of most of the diary is held in the family archive.
Letters of the Rev. Thomas Spencer, Thomas Jones, Mary Day. (Additional letters in the SRO)
H.C. Foxcroft’s World War I & II Diaries: Details of her Aeroplane flight 1912: The Small Rifle Club minutes, articles and photo.
Documents relating to the Hinton property and families which were found in Hinton House and are now in the SRO are all classified under DD/RG.

Hinton Manor Front in Hinton Charterhouse

Hinton Manor Side view in Hinton Charterhouse