Tudors & Influencers

Sir Christopher Hales

Sir Christopher Hales was a powerful figure in the Tudor court. He appeared for the king as Attorney General in the trials of Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More John Fisher, and Queen Anne Boleyn

He was the successor to Cromwell as Master of the Rolls.At the time of his death in 1541 he had amassed great tracts of land across Kent. He left a wife, Elizabeth, three daughters and a son.

Culpepers and Culpepers and Fanes

While Hale’s wife, presumably a rich widow, wasted little time in remarrying,  to a certain John Culpeper in 1542, his daughter Mary, who inherited Howfield, went one better.

Earl  Westmoreland

Mary had married a different but distantly related John Curlpaper of St Stephen’s in 1517.  It is not known when John Culpeper of St Stephen’s died but it was certainly before 1548 when Mary remarried his nephew, yet another John Culpeper.

In the 1557 will of Thomas Culpepper, the father of the latest John Culpeper, there is no mention of his son or his wife and it must be presumed that by this point they were both dead.

Instead one of John’s brothers, Alexander is named as heir and oldest surviving son. It seems likely that Howfield then remained under Alexander until it was given to his sister Elizabeth, possibly in 1564 as part of her wedding dowry to Thomas Fane.

Not far from Howfield, at Martysfield in Wincheap, stands the memorial to 41 protestants burnt at the stake by Queen Mary in 1555. Thomas Fane, who took part in the Wyatt Rebellion in 1554, was fortunate not to have burnt at the stake as well after being found guilty of treason, but was spared by his boyish good looks by Queen Mary.

Howfield was passed onto to Thomas’s son, Francis, who became the First Earl of Westmoreland.

Man , Denew and Roberts

When William Man Esq, a gentleman of Kent, purchased Howfield in 1638 the Canterbury economy, at the time fuelled by protestant refuges, had started to afford new wealth to both merchants and cloth-makers.

Howfield remained in the Man family until William’s grandson sold it in 1688 to John Denew, Merchant of Staplegate, Canterbury.

John Denew, owner of a soap works in Rosemary Lane, was most certainly also involved in the silk trade, with his father and uncle freemen of the Dyer’s company of London.

His great grandfather Philipe de Neu had arrived in 1580 from Picardy fleeing the persecution of the Protestants and is listed in the Book of Aliens as a wool cutter.

John Denew’s son Nathaniel then inherited Howfield in 1699 and at his death in 1720 left it to his son John.

John had no children and in 1761 Howfield reverted to Edward Roberts of Christ Church Hospital and St Stephens, Canterbury, husband to Nathaniel’s Daughter, Elizebeth.

Howfield remained in the Roberts Family until it was sold in 1796 to George Gipps.

Gipps,  Mounts and Beyond

George Gipps was MP for Canterbury from 1780 to 1800. Like Cromwell before him, he had risen through society from the son of a corset maker in Ashford to become a banker then a member of parliament.

Gipps had made his fortune as ‘an extensive and fortunate speculator in the hop trade’.

The Gipps family acquired fast estates around Canterbury including Howletts and Harbledown.

The Gipps estates started to decline at the turn of the 20th century with decreasing rents resulting from cheaper imports from the USA and South America because of railways and refrigeration.

In 1906 and 1909 the Gipps family unsuccessfully tried to sell much of the estate including Howfield.

Shortly afterwards, Howfield Farm was sold to Percy Mount. Percy is described as a nurseryman with a particular interest in carnations and roses and fruit.

 In 1970, the Mounts wound up their business and sold Howfield, splitting the farm and the house.

Today Howfield Farm is part of Newmafruit, one of the Uk’s largest fruit farms

Howfield Manor itself became a hotel in the late 1970’s and is now an independent family concern.

The Building

The original building dates from 1181 as a monastic site for the monks of the Priory of St Gregory.  The footprint of building would have consisted of a chapel and great hall with the working dairy probably where Howfield Farm now stands, along with mills and fishing rights through the Stour valley.

Part of the building that dates from the 12 Century, the Chapel itself, is now the restaurant

Built largely of local flint and bound together with a lime mortar the outside of the chapel would also have been finished with a yellow lime plaster.

By the original window there is a mixture of chalk blocks and limestone.  The local chalk would have been cheaper and easier to work with the more expensive limestone and Kentish Ragstone being used in parts subject to weathering or bearing heavier loads.

The chapel originally two stories high were divided in Tudor times and the now low ceiling of restaurant suggests it was used as a store room or stable.

The beams in the ceiling reclaimed from another building would have originally run vertically rather than horizontally.

The conversion of monastic building after dissolution (1536) was common place across the country, with many buildings being demolished and the materials extracted to  be used elsewhere.

The fire place room would have originally been a great hall and the beams still holding up the roof are of 12th in origin.

Like the chapel the fire place room would have been divided in Tudor times with a second level being added. This would have been made mostly of timber, with a brick fireplace and stair tower.

The fact that the roof beams are 12th century and are marked with roman numerals suggests that the original roof was dismantled and re-assembled over the new building like a medieval version of a flat pack.

The wing that contains the fire place room was rebuilt again in brick in the 1680’s and the roof once again taken down and re-assembled later on.

The two solid Tudor structures of the fire place and stair tower were retained at this point. If you look closely at the fireplace and the chimney above you can see a mixture the original narrow Tudor bricks and wider 17th bricks when the fireplace was enlarged.

The Flemish style of the building and in particular the Dutch Gables indicate that it was re-built by the Denew family whose ancestors had left Warneton in Wallonia.  The building of the wing is a statement that the Denew family had made something since their arrivals as Protestant refugees from the continent.

What would have been the original front of Howfield now faces away from the much later constructed main road.  The local handmade bricks are again held together by a lime mortar.

The 1806 inscription on the porch has nothing to do with the age of the building and was for some reason unknown added in the 20th Century.

Inside the porch are two small windows. These would have been part of the original chapel.  One suggestion is that candles were lit by the monks as a sign of food and drink for the lepers in the nearby Hospital, which like the Priory of St Gregory had also been founded in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc.

Externally at the front of the building (originally the back) there is a clearly picture of what the original chapel would have looked like, including tile like roman bricks that along with the flint would have been part of the rubble infill between more solid stone.