Ashburnham Place

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Ashburnham Place is an English country house, five miles west of Battle in East Sussex. It was one of the finest houses in the southeast of England in its heyday, but much was demolished in 1959,[1] and only a drastically reduced part of the building now remains standing. The remaining buildings are used as a Christian conference and prayer centre.

The village of Ashburnham was the home of the Ashburnham family from the 1100s. The family became wealthy through their land holdings in Sussex and around Pembrey in Carmarthenshire, and later from their participation in the Wealden iron industry. Only the cellars remain from the earliest known house on the site, dating from the fifteenth century. This house was abandoned in the sixteenth century and confiscated by Queen Elizabeth I. The Ashburnham family recovered their estate under Charles I, and John Ashburnham was a loyal servant of the King. He was forced to sell the estate to the Relf family in the English Commonwealth, to pay fines levied for supporting the King.

John Ashburnham recovered the estate again after the English Restoration. His grandson and namesake, John Ashburnham, was created 1st Baron Ashburnham in 1689. The house was largely rebuilt, under the Palladian architect Stephen Wright[2] and the local direction of the builder John Morris of Lewes, ca 1757-61.[3] The grounds, covering some 200 acres and including three large lakes around the house, were laid out by Capability Brown in the mid-eighteenth century. Brown's orangery, c. 1767, houses the oldest camellia in England. Brick external additions were made to the house in Gothic Revival style in 1813-17,[4] by a third John Ashburnham, the 2nd Earl of Ashburnham, to designs by George Dance the Younger. Robert Adam designed entrance lodges for the second Earl in 1785.[5] George Ashburnham, 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, commissioned architectural drawings from John Soane, but it is not known if the suggested additions, including a porte cochere, were built. The house was refaced in stone in the early nineteenth century, and then, when fashions changed, a second, red brick outer skin was added in 1853.[6]

Internally, the house had a mix of styles, with a fine staircase by Charles Dance rising three floors in the central entrance hall. The drawing room was decorated with painted wall panels attributed to Athenian Stuart. The house held the family's fine collection of paintings and extensive library, collected by the 3rd Earl and his son, Bertram Ashburnham, 4th Earl of Ashburnham.[7]

By the late nineteenth century, the family was under financial pressure, and offered to sell the library, including its collection of illuminated manuscripts, to the nation in the 1890s for £160,000. The deal did not go ahead, and the books were sold piecemeal for a total of £228,000 over the next few years.[8] Many were acquired by the British Library, but, for example, the Ashburnham Pentateuch is in Paris. The Earldom became extinct on the death of Thomas Ashburnham, 6th Earl of Ashburnham, in 1924, and the house was inherited by his niece, Lady Catherine Ashburnham. The house was damaged when a fully loaded Marauder bomber crashed nearby during the Second World War, and dry rot set in.

Lady Catherine was the last of the Ashburnham family, and the estate was inherited by Rev. John Bickersteth on her death in 1953. In addition to the prospect of huge repair bills, he was also saddled with crippling death duties of £427,000. The contents of the house were sold at auction at Sotheby's in June and July 1953, and half of the estate was sold in the next few years. The house was mostly demolished in 1959, reducing the central section to two floors and the wings to a single story.

Meanwhile, Bickersteth established a prayer centre in the stable block. He gave the remaining parts of the house, and 220 acres of parkland, to the Ashburnham Christian Trust in April 1960. It is now operated as a Christian conference and prayer centre.

Ashburnham House, London was for a time the holding place of the Cotton library; the manuscript of Beowulf was damaged at a fire there, reported in The Gentleman's Magazine, October 1731.[9]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Colvin 1995: "George Dance".
  2. ^ Colvin 1995: "Stephen Wright".
  3. ^ Colvin 1995: "John Morris".
  4. ^ Colvin 1995: "George Dance"
  5. ^ Colvin 1995: "Robert Adam".
  6. ^ Dorothy Stroud, George Dance, Architect 1745-1825 (London) 1971; Colvin 1995: "George Dance".
  7. ^ The archives were summarized by F.W. Steer, The Ashburnham Archives (Lewes, Sussex) 1958 (noted in Colvin 1995 "Lewis Vulliamy").
  8. ^ Peter H. Reid, "The Decline and Fall of the British Country House Library" Libraries & Culture 36.2, Spring 2001, pp. 345-366.
  9. ^ "Beowulf: Ashburnham House Fire"

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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