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The
History of The Tudor Walled Garden |
The garden that you can see today has its origins in Tudor Times when a ‘Greate House’ was built here after the Reformation. The brick walls were put up to create a sheltered pleasure garden for the master of the house. However archaeological excavations carried out from 1990 to 1996 show that the site was used long before the garden was laid out and some much older buildings became part of it.
Prehistory
During the Bronze Age the whole area was laid to fields
which were drained with a series of parallel ditches. One of the ditches runs
under the fountain and Bronze Age pottery was discovered in the bottom of
it. There was also Iron Age occupation (c. 700BC - AD43) but the focus of
this is to the east in Dovehouse Field.
In the garden there was little evidence of this time but the Romans certainly left their mark. Next to a deep cess pit a Roman was buried where the cross-shaped flower beds are now. He was buried with his head on his feet and it was discovered that it had been carefully removed and placed there. On his finger was a bronze ring and there were a few pieces of pottery which helped to date when he was buried; the 2nd century AD. His body had been cut through when a planting trench was dug a thousand years later and all of his right side became lost, so he was named Lefty.
The Templars
After the Roman period, the area seems to have
been largely abandoned for several centuries. In 1137 Queen Matilda granted
the land to the Order of the Knights Templar and they set about clearing the
area ready for farming. They built a mansion house with associated buildings,
gardens, a dovecote, a chapel with cemetery, a watermill and a windmill.
In the garden area, they dug a huge pit surrounded by several other smaller, conical ones and we believe they mined out the clay to make the puddled clay floors for the barns.
The Hospitallers
When Cressing Temple was handed over to the Knights Hospitallers by King
Edward the Second around 1310 more building took place. In the garden area
they dug a pair of trenches right across the garden from where the west door
is now, one of which cut through Lefty. The gap between them was then covered
with cinders to make a path. North of the path was found a great deal of clinker
from a forge. South of the path we think was the chapel garden which later
became part of the cemetery.
The Tudor Garden
After the Reformation where King Henry the Eighth
seized all the lands belonging to the church, Cressing Temple was bought by
Sir John Smythe in 1539, who at the time was leasing the site from the Knights
Hospitaller. He set about a great building programme incorporating the existing
buildings into a huge Tudor mansion later called the 'Greate House'. As part
of this complex he built the Walled Garden which was attached to the chapel
at the south. A brick path with a raised terrace formed the edge of the garden.
The flower beds were almost certainly raised with wooden edges and these have
left little trace.
The Garden's Decline
The garden continued as a pleasure area for some hundred years and there
is evidence that the brick paths were patched up and repaired. After a while
though the bricks became too rough to walk on and so they were covered with
a deep layer of gravel. During the English Civil War, the Neville-Smyths were
persecuted because they were Royalists and the garden fell into decline. Eight
years after the war the site was sold and the garden was turned into an allotment.
Producing Food in
the Garden
Now that times were harder, better use had to be made of the land and
the Walled Garden made an ideal place to grow food, sheltered from the wind
and defensible against theft and animals.
The Tudor brick terrace was dug up and its retaining wall buried. Soil was brought in and also moved from the north of the garden to the south. In the southern half of the garden, trenches were dug right across to act as planting slots and these were filled with improved soil containing sand and charcoal. In the northern half of the garden an orchard was planted and fruit bushes let to ramble.
About 1703 the site was bought by a consortium of businessmen and they dismantled the Greate House and the Chapel, probably to sell for salvage. Fortunately they kept the Walled Garden to serve the Farmhouse as a kitchen garden. The first drawing of it is shown on the estate map of 1797 when it is called the ‘Brick Garden.’
A Victorian
Pleasure Garden.
The next clear map of the Walled Garden was made
for the 1876 Ordnance Survey and this shows it to be formally laid out to
lawns, flowerbeds and an orchard. The big walnut tree is there and a brick
wall has been built across the gap at the south to enclose the garden completely.
This map is very detailed and shows the different types of trees; conifers,
deciduous and fruit.
During the 19th century, interest in horticulture was revived and as the British Empire expanded more and more exotic plants were brought back for study and growth. Glass houses, hotbeds and walled gardens were filled with foreign and experimental trees and plants. In our garden we have a fig tree, a mulberry and some quinces grafted onto hawthorn stock (now lost).
The garden stayed much the same until the County Council purchased the site in 1987 when it was realised that here was a unique opportunity to build on the knowledge of the past and create a new Walled Garden.
