Wricklemarsh revisited

WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED MICHAEL EGAN Over the years, the name of Wricklemarsh has been well-enough known to local historians living in the vicinity of Blackheath, in south east London. It lay in north west Kent until the establishment of the L.C.C., in 1888. A Domesday vill and medieval agricultural estate, it was briefly en parked in the eighteenth century, with a substantial stately home - Wricklemarsh House. Development began in the 1780s, culminating in a residential suburb which today comprises much of the eastern half of the Blackheath area. Its early history has attracted curiously little commentary in antiquarian publications. Edward Hasted, in the first edition of his History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, was only able to say of Wricklemarsh that nothing was known of its past from Domesday Book until the beginning of the reign of King James I. Drake's expansion of Hasted, however, is rather more forthcoming. The working papers of A.R. Martin, a prominent local historian of the 1930s and 1940s, contain limited material on Wricklemarsh - insufficient it would seem to persuade him to put pen to paper on the topic. Only in the last 20 years have John Smith and Neil Rhind discussed the place in their respective volumes on Charlton and Blackheath Village. THE WRICKLEMARSH AREA It is generally believed that Witenemers, listed within the Hundred of Grenviz in the Domesday survey, is the earliest known reference to what we now call Wricklemarsh. It is recorded as a vill rather than a manor, and there is no known record of it ever subsequently achieving manorial status. It also appears in the Domesday Monachorum 1 (c. 1100) as Wyttunemersc. Wallenberg (quoting Ekwall)2 1 VCH, Kent, II, 267. 2 J.K. Wallenberg, Place Names of Kent, Uppsala (1934), 1. 161 MICHAEL EGAN proposes that the first element Wrickle -was originally Writtle - with the overtones of a babbling brook. The 'witan' flavour of these two earliest forms is thought to be a corruption produced by the Norman scribes when recording the information provided by local officials. The second element of the place name is a valuable pointer to the topography of Wricklemarsh. While the higher, northern parts of the hamlet were on the well-drained Blackheath Pebble Beds, the central section lay on London Clay, and attracted streams running off the western slopes of Shooter's Hill (130 m.) and down to the lower land (20 m.) at the southern end of the estate. Wricklemarsh shared this clay to the east with the adjoining manor of Kidbrooke (OE - broc suggesting marsh). In fact, the parish of Kidbrooke incorporated a lower section of Wricklemarsh (Fig. 1) in the later medieval period. But the river Quaggy formed a definite parochial boundary with Eltham, indicating that intercommoning was unlikely in this marshy tract. As an inland marsh, it was quite different in character from the principal marsh of the Greenwich parish to the north - on the Blackwall peninsula -or the Stepney marshes on the Isle of Dogs, on the other side of the Thames. Landowners in the Greenwich marsh included some living up to two miles away in Charlton, Kidbrooke and Wricklemarsh, not to mention fields held by the Roper charity in Farningham, 15 miles to the south-east. Presumably those resident on the higher ground around the Blackheath plateau valued access to the Greenwich marsh in times of drought when their local streams ran dry. Unlike the Greenwich and Stepney marshes,3 tidal flooding was not a problem. In a range of sources, Wricklemarsh is variously referred to as 'the town of Wricklemarsh', 'Wricklemarsh in the parish of Charlton', 'Wricklemarsh Farm', 'Wricklemarsh estate', 'Wricklemarsh Park', 'the Hamlett of Wricklemarsh', and just plain Wricklemarsh. The area included under the label of Wricklemarsh has evidently altered somewhat over the years. Perhaps the most detailed demonstration of the size and shape of Wricklemarsh in the eighteenth century is the survey map produced for the Board of Ordnance in 1783,4 when the government contemplated the purchase of the estate for the military academy which was finally built on its present site at Woolwich. The fields of Wricklemarsh at this time extended to the north into the parish of Lewisham, with the central section of the estate spreading across the western extremities of the parishes of Charlton : K.G.T. McDonnell, Medieval London Suburbs, London (1968), 66. P.R.O. Maps. W.O. 78/2485. 162 WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED 163 MICHAEL EGAN and Kidbrooke, while the southernmost reaches lay in the parish of Eltham. Fig. 1 shows these borders superimposed on a modern plan of the area, with the letters L, C, K and E indicating the land lying in those parishes. There was also a small incursion over the Greenwich parochial boundary immediately to the south-west of Morden College. It is noteworthy that the streams which crossed the estate ( open then but now largely in culverts) acted as the parochial boundaries. These streams are respectively known as the Upper Kid Brook, the Mid Kid Brook, and the Quaggy - after its confluence with the Lower Kid Brook - which formed the Kidbrooke and Eltham interface in the south. The Tithe Commutation maps of the late 1830s and early 1840s can be readily related to the boundaries of the 1783 survey, thus allowing us to calculate the total acreage of Wricklernarsh in the early Victorian period. In Lewisham parish there were approximately 28 acres, in Charlton 103 acres, in Kidbrooke 106 acres, in Eltham 29 acres and the small area in Greenwich was about 3 acres, producing a total of 269 acres. The quantity quoted on the 1783 map was 283 acres for a slightly different area, and in 1723 an estate of 273 acres had been sold to Sir Gregory Page by the Trustees of Morden College,5 which again was not precisely the same fields as those totalled from the Tithe award. The 1723 acreage did nevertheless effectively represent the holding of Sir John Morden in the late seventeenth century. ALTERATIONS IN THE ACREAGE We learn from the Domesday survey that there was sufficient ploughland for four teams, the same number as was given for the adjacent vill of Lee, and both are quoted as having 13 labourers, giving an estimate of 50 or so inhabitants in each place at that time. If each plough team could cope with about 120 acres per year, dependent on the nature of the soil, this would suggest potential ploughland of around 500 acres for Witenemers. To reconcile this figure with the area of the park in the eighteenth century is. difficult at first sight, unless Witenemers extended much further east into the Kidbrooke area, or in other directions. The vill would almost certainly have been a patchwork of fields, interspersed with other tenants' holdings, rather than a compact agglomeration of adjoining acreage. 5 P.R.O. Close Roll. 10 Geo I (C54/5245) pt. 15, no. 4. 164 WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED After the Domesday Monachorum, we next hear of Wricklemarsh in the more recognisable spelling of Wrlelm'ss in a rental of the twelfth year of King Edward I (1283-84). This document reports the amounts paid by individuals in Grenewych, Combe, Wrytelm'ss and Leuesham, and reveals that 55 pence came from the Wricklemarsh tenants while the others paid a total of 366 pence, a ratio of slightly more than 6: 1. The Domesday valuations for the comparable areas in 1086 give a ratio of exactly 6: 1, suggesting little change in the value - and size? - of the two areas in the intervening 200 years. The Lay Subsidy rolls might be thought the next helpful indicator of relative size and wealth of the various vills or townships in the Hundred of Blackheath, even though the tax was based on personal possessions as well as land-holding income. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, these rolls list many names of residents in the Hundred, grouped under townships, and even though a manor and parish like Kidbrooke may occasionally be listed independently, there are alas no readily identifiable collections of Wricklemarsh names, and hence their possessions. The Poll Tax of 13777 likewise does not give figures for Wricklemarsh although we find that the population of Lewisham was 227, with Charlton having 58 taxable persons over the age of 15, in the period immediately following the Black Death. In 1381, a feoffment of land to John Cheseman of East Greenwich from John Poteman of 'Wrytilmsh in the parish of Charlton'8 might just be a significant indication that the size of the Wricklemarsh estate was confined to the western part of Charlton parish at that time. It is more likely that the location given for Poteman was only a sensible shorthand to save the time and cost of a fuller description in what was a brief legal document. However, in a 1527 Pedes Fini um recording the sale of Wricklemarsh, it is specified as being 'situate in Wryttelmershe, Ketbroke, Charleton, Levesham and Est Grenewich' ,9 giving the first confirmation that Wricklemarsh extended into these other parishes. This piece is notable also as the first, known, post-medieval document to reveal definite details of the extent of Wricklemarsh. It records the sale of land from Roger Legh and his wife Mary ( one of the daughters of William Spark - see below) to a group of purchasers including John Purslowe. The transfer involved 12 messuages, 1 dovecote, 200 acres of land 6 P.R.O. Rentals and Surveys. SC12, 9/23. 7 P.R.O. Subsidy Roll. 8179, 123/37. 8 Grt. London Ree. Off. E/MW/C 310. 9 P.R.O. Pedes Finium. 18 Hen 8, Hi!. CP25/2, 20/119. 165 MICHAEL EGAN (i.e. arable), 40 acres of meadow, 200 acres of pasture, 40 acres of wood and 20 acres of heath; that is some 500 acres in total. It is safe to assume that those place-names are probably in descending order of acreage - most in Wricklemarsh, least in Greenwich - which of course corresponds with the acreages in those parishes as we know them to have been at the time of the Tithe Commutation Act. The total also correlates with the earlier estimate of the Domesday acreage. These figures are repeated thrice in the next few years, firstly in 154610 as the Purslowes disposed of their interest to William Gray, who himself sold on the same quantities to Laurence Ball in 1549.11 (In the earlier of those sales, the letter k appears for the first time in the spelling Wrykelmershe, with the form Wricklemarsh first being noted in the will of William Richardson in 1556). 12 A further 9 acres was added to Ball's holding in June 1561 by purchase from the widowed Mrs. Joan Bush. After Laurence Ball's death later in 1561, his eldest son Sophony or Sophonias, then a minor, inherited the Wricklemarsh estate, but in 1574 disposed of around 50 acres to Brian Annesley, who was also tenant of the Manor of Lee. On 8th January, 1574, 13 (and not 1564 as quoted by Drake and others) Annesley bought 'the messuage or tenement with barns, stable, outhouses, orchard and garden, with eight pieces of land, 50 acres more or less of land to the same messuage belonging'. This is an intriguing disposal since it seems to separate a small but viable farmstead within the Wricklemarsh estate. Sophony died a month later, when his brother Edmund inherited and, in 1578,14 he leased Wricklemarsh to Thomas Blount (d. 1579), who had married his widowed mother Elizabeth. A series of further transactions transferred these holdings with their acreages specified to Elizabeth Blount, who in 1580 had married Alexander Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul's, after being widowed for the second time. When Brian Annesley died in 1604, his distinct Wricklemarsh holding passed to his daughter Cordelia and she promptly sold it in December 1604 to Elizabeth Nowell.15 Thus, the previous Wricklemarsh estate returned to one owner. The PCC wills of Elizabeth Nowell (1611) and her son Edward Blount (1617) pass the land down through the family, with it reaching Col. Thomas Blount (Edward's 10 Ibid. Pedes Finium. 38 Hen 8, Mich. CP25/2. 23/150 (f. 55). 11 P.R.O. Close Roll. 3 Ed 6 (C54/462) pt. 4, mm. 27-8. 12 Consist. Crt. Rochester. Reg XII, f. 52a. 1 3 P.R.O. Close Roll. 16 Eliz (C54/953) pt. 28. 14 Morden Coll. Muniments Room. Red Book, Wricklemarsh, ed. R. Saw. 15 P.R.O. Close Roll. 2 Jas I (C54/1767) pt. 2. 166 WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED eldest son) after the remarriage of Edward's second wife Fortune in 1623. This Thomas Blount II acquired further small plots in Kidbrooke and Charlton, some by exchange, presumably to consolidate his holdings. It is believed without definite evidence, that in the early Stuart period the Blount family may have disposed of 200 acres in the eastern sector of Wricklemarsh to Lord Hervey (d. 1642), Lord of the Manor of Kidbrooke and his daughter Elizabeth (1611-1702). In 1669, the Blount family conveyed their interest in the estate to John Morden, who later became Sir John, the founder of Morden College. 16 This composite transaction is the first available which lists the field names of what was the greater part of the property. Subsequent documents actually specify the sizes of these fields, thus allowing us to place many of them within the outlines of the 1783 map. The 1669 transfer took place in two parts, the first conveying 'all that capital messuage, mansion house or tenement' along with 30 named fields of about 125 acres to Morden, at the cost of £1,950. The second deed dated on the next day, 8th July, speaks of a further consideration of £2,250 paid by John Morden to acquire a further 76 acres. This total of around 200 acres was to form the core of Morden's holdings in Wricklemarsh, which were eventually sold to Sir Gregory Page in 1723 as part of the 273 acres which he acquired to form the bulk of Wricklemarsh Park. An interesting feature of the second transaction is that eight of the fields (totalling 43 acres) were part of the 'Queen's Lands' - a collection of widely separated fields in East Greenwich, Lewisham, Charlton, Eltham, Woolwich, Beckenham and Chislehurst. These fields were granted to royal servants from at least 1527, when Sir William Crompton, Under Treasurer of the Exchequer, received them for the term of his life. It is unclear when they first attracted the description of the 'Queen's Lands.' TENANTS AND OCCUPANTS The Domesday Book offers three names connected with the Wricklemarsh estate - Anschil who was tenant-in-chief under King Edward the Confessor; Bishop Odo of Bayeux who was the principal tenant under his half-brother William the Conqueror; and the son of Turald of Rochester, who in the Domesday Monachorum is named as Ralf fitzTurald, where he is credited with a further 10 manors and vills. Curiously, the other manors are largely located around a Dartford - Maidstone axis. These holdings doubtless reverted to the king after the bishop's departure from England in 1088, and it has been argued 16 Ibid. Close Roll. 21 Chas II (C54/4276) pt. 13, mm. 31/2 and 36-8. 167 MICHAEL EGAN elsewhere17 that they were granted to Geoffrey Talbot (d. 1130), before reaching Cecily, Countess of Hereford sometime in the reign of King Henry II. Walter de Meduana (or Mayenne), her second husband, declared his Kent possessions in 1166 to be 29 knight's fees, 18 20 of which were previously held by Geoffrey Talbot II (d. 1140). Professor Douglas was clear that these lands known as the Honour of Talbot were granted to Walter de Meduana by King Stephen. 19 In 1196-97, Cecily appears with her great-nephew William de Muntkenesi or Montecanisio jointly paying scutage for (the same?) 29 fees in Kent. 20 William's son Warin subsequently paid a fine for the whole of his father's estate, receiving it in 1214. 21 Warin was described as Baron of Swanscampe (Swanscombe), and his lands included many of Ralf fitzTurald's known holdings. Warin was also tenant-in-chief of lands in Eltham, Woolwich and in Mottingham, demonstrating definite interests in the Hundred of Blackheath. 22 In summary, evidence seems to exist to provide a possible line of ownership of Wricklemarsh for 150 years after the Domesday survey. What is more certain is that Cecily Countess of Hereford also owned the adjacent manor of Kidbrooke, which she donated to the Priory of St. Mary Overy in Southwark during the reign of King Henry II, perhaps as an obit for Walter who died in the late 1180s. 23 This may indicate a link between this manor and Wricklemarsh. After this surmise concerning Montecanisio as the tenant-in-chief, the trail goes dead. It is confused by a rental of 1283-846 which was described by Drake as a manorial roll of Wricklemarsh, thus complicating access to the piece. In fact the P.R.O. catalogues this item under Rentals and Surveys, and examination shows it to be a rental of Grenewych, Combe, Wrytelm'ss and Leuesham. The inhabitants were paying their dues to Egidius de Halle and there are other contemporary references to Giles the steward of Greenwich,24 and to Egidius de Aula25 which is presumably the Latin version of the same individual's surname; in 1266, Giles was the name of the prior or agent of the Ghent abbey for their manor in Lewisham. 26 17 Greenwich Loe. Hist. Lib. M.J. Egan, Twelfth Century Kidbrooke. (Unpub). 18 (Ed.) H. Hall, Red Book of the Exchequer, London (1897), 195. 19 D.C. Douglas, The Domesday Monachorum of Christchurch Canterbury , Royal Hist. Soc. (1944), 49. 20 H. Hall op. cit. , 96. 21 P.R.O. Fine Roll. 15 John (C60/5A) m. 2. 22 H.H. Drake, (Ed.) Hasted's History of Kent. The Hundred of Blackheath, London (1886), 146. 23 (Ed.) J. Carey, W. Dugdale, Monasticon, (1830), VI, 170. 24 Trans. Greenwich and Lewisham Antiq. Soc., i (1910), 140. 25 P.R.O. Rentals and Surveys. SC12, 9/24. 26 Brit. Lib. Cotton. MSS. Ortho B xiv, f79b (formerly f. 76). 168 W RICKLEMA RS H REVISITED This rental might imply that in 1283-84 Wricklemarsh was a part of the holdings of the alien abbey of St. Peter of Ghent, which for many years had owned the manor of Lewisham, which at that time also included (East) Greenwich and Combe. A charter of St. Peter's dated 139627 referred to a previous Ghent holding in Serleton (?Charleton), which may have been Wricklemarsh, lying of course within the parish of Charlton.* Perhaps Wricklemarsh had passed to the monks of Ghent after the death of Warin de Montecanisio in 1255, and it then lost its independent identity. No evidence has been found of the identity of the chief tenant for the next 150 years. We come across individuals such as John Ricardes (1367), John Poteman (1381) and John Symme (1387) who are described as being 'of Writelmershe', but without any indication of their status in the area. Various other fifteenth-century records give us the names of 15 other individuals specifically connected with Wricklemarsh; again, the nature of their ownership is unclear. Amongst these names is that of John Norman, whose will was proved in 1451 in the Commissary Court of London,28 who mentions his wife Joan and son William (both deceased), as well as gifting his lands and tenements 'in Writtelmersshe, Ketilbrok and Est Grenwich' to Robert Leche. This John may well have been the same person as the John Norman - wife also Joan - who conveyed land in Kidbrook in 1430.29 In this period, there was also a John Norman -wife also Joan, with Norfolk origins - who was a member of the royal household and a sheriff of London,30 but no link can be established beyond the Greenwich information. Robert Leche's name appears in a feoffment of 1482 where the names of John a Dene (or Deane) and his wife Margaret are linked with Wricklemarsh for the first time. 31 In fact, it was in 1442 that a John de Dene is first heard of as a witness to a transfer of lands in Charlton to Phillip de Dene of Woolwich,32 and the name John a Dene is found several times in the next 40 years until he is actually described as 'of Wretilmshe'. He acquired further lands in Charlton parish in 1482,33 and in his will both written and proved in May 1489,34 there are legacies to Isbell my • I am grateful to Julian Watson for this point. 27 A. van Lokeren, Chartes et Documents de l'Abbaye ..., Gand (1868-71), no. 1439. 28 Guildhall Library. MSS 9171/5, f. 27. 29 P.R.O. Pedes Finium. 9 Hen VI CP25/l, 114/305, f. 292. 30 P.R.O. Patent Roll. 22 Hen VI (C66/458) pt. 2 m. 14. 31 Grt. London Ree. Off. E/MW/C 302. 32 H.H. Drake op. cit., 232. 33 Grt. London Ree. Off. E/MW/C 303 and 304. 34 Ibid., 305. 169 MICHAEL EGAN (?second) wife, and the direction that 'all my landdes and tenements being and lying in the towne of Wretylmershe in the County of Kent and in the parish of Sent Luke (i.e. Charlton ) ... to be solde be myne executors for to pay my detts'. From this brief detail it is impossible to sense what acreage was held by John a Dene in Wricklemarsh, although he also refers to his lands and tenements in the town of Charlton. No major money gifts are mentioned, and he appears to be of yeoman rather than husbandman rank, but not to be a significant land-owner. The next relevant reference to landholding is in the will of John Fulthorp of Wricklemarsh, proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in 1493. He wants the tenement (singular) in Wricklemarsh which he and his wife bought from the executors of John Deyoe, to be sold and the money to be given to the Church, with a request for prayers for his soul. The usual amounts of such legacies are up to £20 or so, and not the several hundred pounds which a 500 acre estate would have commanded - suggesting that he, too, only had a fraction of the Domesday property; however, this PPC will also mentions land in Suffolk, indicating a man of some substance. The Patent Rolls show that a John Fulthrop (sic)35 was appointed in 1484 to be Keeper of the Manor of Greenwich for life ( although 18 months later the office was assigned to George Keen) which fact also indicates important status. In Fulthorp's will, he instructs that his Suffolk property is to pass to his wife Margaret and to his daughter Elizabeth, and if the said Elizabeth has no offspring, then to William Sparke - presumably his son-in-law. Sparke's own will of 1510 appoints Elizabeth his wife and Margaret Fulthorp 'matre mea' as his executors. One concludes that Fulthorp's Wricklemarsh lands were not sold as he had asked, but had passed to William Sparks and thence to William's daughter Mary, since she is named as the wife of Roger Legh in the Pedes Finium of 1527 (supra), which records the transfer of the 500-acre estate of Wricklemarsh. The succeeding ownership of the majority of the estate is detailed on pages 3 and 4 of Neil Rhind's second volume on Blackheath Village. In the period 1520 to 1620 a total of 80 names of those with Wricklemarsh connections are recorded, some of whom only had small parcels or individual fields there. Particularly noteworthy are the royal servants amongst the landowners in Wricklemarsh. Perhaps this is not surprising, since Greenwich was one of the principal royal residences for the Tudors, and continued to be used frequently by the 35 P.R.O. Patent Roll. 1 Ric III (C66/554) m. 18. 170 WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED royal families until the Civil War. The Hundred of Blackheath provided an arc of manors and estates surrounding the palace, from Deptford in the west through Lee and Eltham in the south, around to Woolwich on the river to the east of Greenwich. A place such as Wricklemarsh could offer either a convenient home or pied-a-terre for a middle-ranking official during the period when the court was in residence. Thus the Patent Rolls of 154736 mention that William Gray's wife Agnes was Silkwoman of the Great Wardrobe and that her husband was 'Our Plumber'. Laurence Ball was granted the 'said room' for life and was licensed 'to take up at reasonable prices such artificers and workfolkes as he shall think necessary'. This explains the link whereby Ball of London purchased the Wricklemarsh estate from Gray of Reading in 1549. Ball's son Sophony sold part of the estate to Brian Annesley, 13 a Gentleman Pensioner, whose brother Nicholas was 'a yeoman for the mouth of the office of the cellar', and an intriguing aristocratic family was also associated with Wricklemarsh. There is a memorial plaque in St. Luke's church in Charlton for 'Robert Veer Esquier the third son of John Deveer Earle of Oxenford' (i.e. the fifteenth earl, 1482-1540). Robert died on 28th April, 1598, and his will describes him as of 'Ricklemarsh in the parysshe of Charleton', mentions his wife Joan, and makes benefactions to the Charlton parish. Drake says that the administration (May 1586) of the will of John Veer son of Robert, actually refers to John also as 'of Wricklemarsh', though re-examination of the microfilm 37 does not appear to mention this location. But the royal warrant of 159238 to hear an action between Brian Annesley and Dean Alexander Nowell stated that the case (about alleged encroachment in the manor of Kidbrooke) was to be heard at the mansion house of Edward Veer 'at Wratlemarsh'. Presumably, this was not Edward, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, whose title would surely have been quoted. Since it has not been possible to trace another Edward de Veer of the time, then possibly the name Edward was a slip of the hand by the scribe of the warrant who should have written Robert instead. Brian Annesley's wife was a Tyrrell from Essex, one of whose kinsmen had married the widowed wife of the sixteenth earl, which may be the route by which the de Veres arrived. As the seventeenth century progressed, more and more details of the ownership and occupants of the mansion house, farmstead and 36 Ibid. Patent Roll. 1 Ed VI, pt. 3, m. 29. 37 P.R.O. PCC Admon. Prob 6/3. 38 P.R.O. Deposition by Commission. El34, 34-35 Eliz/Mich 41. 171 MICHAEL EGAN specific fields in Wricklemarsh become available, to the point where we know the tenants of every field lying within the estate which was sold to Sir Gregory Page in 1723. THE ECONOMY OF THE ESTATE There is no available evidence to prove that Wricklemarsh was anything but an agricultural hamlet in the sixteenth century. Nearby Lewisham had watermills, lime-kilns and tanneries, Deptford and Woolwich had shipbuilding and related activities, while Charlton had its brickfields and a windmill. The only suggestion of any conceivable industrial pursuits in Wricklemarsh is offered by the lease of Margaret Field for a Greenwich potter to dig his clay, and a field called Gravel Pit which could just indicate commercial mineral extraction. No will nor any other document hints at anything but farming- which included fishponds and a vineyard. Life in the community must have been dictated by the fields already specified: 200 acres each of arable and pasture, 40 acres each of meadow and woods, and 20 acres of heathland. The pasture would have fed the oxen used for plough and cartage, with presumably cattle and sheep for milk, meat, hides and skins, and perhaps riding or draught horses to transport produce to local or London markets. Brought-in livestock may also have been held here and pastured against the requirements of the Greenwich palace kitchens. The enormous demands on the royal manors during an important festival or diplomatic occasion at Greenwich, must have resulted in requirements for additional food and fodder, some of which may well have _come from Wricklemarsh. The surplus generated by the estate was doubtless sold in the locality or sent to London - as was still the case in the nineteenth century. Milne's Land Use map of 180039 demonstrates that Wricklemarsh was at the outer limit of those farms which could deliver perishable dairy products to London within the day, as well as offering cereals and fresh produce in good condition. The major orchards and arable farms were further away. WHERE WAS THE MANSION HOUSE? The location of Sir Gregory's eighteenth-century Wricklemarsh House - in the region of the junction of Blackheath Park and Pond 39 Thos. Milne, Plan of the Cities of London . .., London Topog.S oc., nos.1 18 and 119 (1975-6). 172 WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED Road - is well-attested. We are less certain of the whereabouts of Sir John Morden's house, which was said in 1723 to be 'a very old house and is very much out of repair and the same is not inhabited ... and hath stood empt6 ever since a short time after the death of Dame Susan Morden'. 4 She was Sir John's widow, who had died in 1721. Since the Annesley holding in Wricklemarsh was only of the order of 50 acres, it would have been unlikely to support more than two or three agricultural labourers in addition to the occupant of the house there. However, a map exists (Fig. 2) which is claimed to show Wricklemarsh around the year 1610, and it gives the names of six individuals, all of whom (and no others) are in the Court Baron records of Charlton parish41 for the years 1607-17 as the elected Constables of Wricklemarsh. This neatly confirms both the location and supposed date of the map. The fact that they were constables of Wricklemarsh indicates that they were living within that part of the estate which was in Charlton parish, i.e. the more northerly region, rather than in the southern Lee Green end of the estate which by 1656 extended into Eltham parish.42 This much-debated map was drawn at a time when cartographers did not necessarily orientate a plan with North at the upper edge. It is recommended that the map is best turned clockwise through 90° when it can be argued that it then shows the Upper Kid Brook in the thin dotted lines above the fields and houses. The brook would then be coming from a north-easterly direction to travel due west through what is now the centre of Blackheath Village, just north of the present railway lines. There is no other natural feature at the Blackheath end of the Charlton parish (west of the modern Pond Road) which would correspond to this aspect of the map. The broader road from the north-east would then point in the direction of the one-time pond in Pond Road and onwards towards the parish church in Charlton, where Wricklemarsh people doubtless worshipped and had rights of burial, etc. After circumventing the houses of the hamlet, the road would then have run due south giving access to the fields of the estate. The orchard on the map would thus lie on an east-west axis - to catch the maximum amount of sunshine from the south - with the Home Feilde which is marked as pasture having the brook as its northern boundary, convenient for keeping the cattle well-watered and close to the dwellings. Nevertheless, one must observe that the shading at the sides of the houses on the map 40 Morden Coll. Muniments Room. Sir John Morden's Will Book, 115. 41 Grt. London Ree. Off. E/MW/C 509. 42 Morden Coll., op. cit., Deed Abstract 34. 173 '· . . . , I • I . I :' i ' . 1· I , I : : I I , I ' H0n1c Feil d e r . I n·yn,c /(?"· r􀀄,... .. .r-__ _ /_ 32. l'.-...: MICHAEL EGAN I I I Fig. 2. A plan of Wricklemarsh in 1610 attributed to Richard Marshall. Reproduced by kind permission of the Lewisham Local History Centre. would thus imply that the sun was shining from the north. This could, however, simply be a purely decorative feature. Where then was the Annesley 50-acre farmstead, if the 1610 map does show houses in the larger part of the one-time Ball estate? The field names quoted in the 1574 sale to Annesley include Charlton and Kidbrooke fields, and seem to have been to the east of the bigger entity. The bulk were to the south of the Upper Kid Brook, and may have centred in the area of the modern Morden Road. Such a location would have been close to the manor of Kidbrooke which 174 WRICKLEMARSH REVISITED Annesley was leasing by 1587. 43 It might also then have seemed at a convenient distance away for a dower house in time of Thomas Blount II. On the 1783 map there is a substantial-looking building to the south-east of Wricklemarsh House, as well as one known to have been the Keeper's Lodge in 1783, either of which may have previously been the 'Annesley' house. THE WRICKLEMARSH BOUNDARIES The earliest indication of the northern edge of the estate is the map published with the Travers Survey of the Manor of East Greenwich in 1697.44 The curiously jagged border was later rounded out to the present Montpelier Vale and Row, and to South Row, by agreements from between 1727 and 1756 from the parish and manor of Lewisham. 45 Another untraced agreement must have incorporated the small parcel in Greenwich at the eastern end of the Paragon, before the perambulation of that parish in May 1735, when permission was requested to beat the bounds within Sir Gregory's park. 46 It has been suggested by John Coulter that the northern boundary of Wricklemarsh ( and the south-easternmost edge of the Heath) may once have been the Upper Kid Brook, which would imply that none of the estate then lay in the parish of Lewisham. Support is given to this view by an order (no. 6) in the Lewisham Court Roll of 1664 which says 'that since noe of the Inhabitants of Wrickles Marsh ever had any right of Comon upon Blackheath . . . that noe of the aforesaid Inhabitants of Wrecke shall put or suffer any of their cattell to be entercomonrs with us ... upon paine of forfeiture'. Possibly Wricklemarsh had recently expanded north of the brook into Lewisham ground and was claiming grazing rights; certainly the 1669 sale to Morden included land in Lewisham, and such appears on Travers' map. At what stage the Wricklemarsh lands incorporated fields in Eltham to the south is more difficult to determine. They are mentioned in a Blount marriage settlement of 1656,42 which is the earliest definite information available. However, the 1605 survey of Eltham47 says that the fields at Lee Green, which later comprised the 43 Brit. Lib. Add. Chtrs. 36703. 44 John Kimbell, An Account of the Legacies ... of Greenwich, (1816). 45 Lewisham Loe. Hist. Centre. Lewisham Court Roll, 1741, p. 19. 46 Greenwich Loe. Hist. Lib. Greenwich Vestry Minute Book, 17 May, 1735. 47 P.R.O. Miseell. Books, Series I. E164/44, ff. 16-18. 175 MICHAEL EGAN southernmost section of the Wricklemarsh estate, 'lye against the new parke neere leye greene'.48 The eastern border, though, is of greater interest. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Wricklemarsh comprised about 500 acres, the Manor of Kidbrooke was quoted in a 1608 survey as having 355 acres. We know that Wricklemarsh was 283 acres in 1783, when the Manor of Kidbrooke was 755 acres in total. These two sets of figures are not strictly comparable in view of intervening land transactions, but do not preclude the possibility that more than 200 acres may have passed from the 500-acre estate to the Lords of the Manor of Kidbrooke. If so, this seems most likely to have occurred in the reign of King Charles I when the Hervey family owned the manor, since they do not appear to have been associated with the Commonwealth. It could, however, have happened at the time of the 1669 sale by the Blounts to Morden. The road running south from Blackheath to Lee Green formed the western periphery, and is perhaps the longest established limit of the estate. It might be thought that the history of Blackheath Village really only dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. This essay has emphasised that recorded history of the village area goes back to the Domesday survey, even if it was called Wricklemarsh in the earlier centuries. The enparking of the Wricklemarsh estate by Sir Gregory Page in the 1720s presumably prompted reference to the village as Blackheath, so as to distinguish it from the Park. The names of those six residents in the Charlton court records in 1607-17 imply that the population of the agricultural workers and their families was probably around 50 or so - either living in the hamlet or elsewhere in the vicinity - which was about the number required to work a 500-acre estate. This of course is the total indicated by Domesday Book. Agricultural technology had made little progress in those 500 years. I am much indebted to the staffs of the Greenwich Local History Library, the Lewisham Local History Centre, the Muniments Room of Morden College, the Kent Archives Office, the Public Record Office and the Greater London Record Office for their considerable assistance in the preparation of this study; my thanks to them all. 48 P.R.O. Land Revenue. LR2, 197, ff. 222-223. 176