A pretty February thing: Musings on Manor houses and Merry England

The Manor Farm

The rock-like mud unfroze a little and rills

Ran and sparkled down each side of the road

Under the catkins wagging in the hedge.

But earth would have her sleep out, spite of the sun;

Nor did I value that thin gilding beam

More than a pretty February thing

Till I came down to the old Manor Farm,

And church and yew-tree opposite, in age

Its equals and in size.  The church and yew

And farmhouse slept in a Sunday silentness.

The air raised not a straw.  The steep farm roof,

With tiles duskily glowing, entertained

The midday sun; and up and down the roof

White pigeons nestled.  There was no sound but one.

Three cart-horses were looking over a gate

Drowsily through their forelocks, swishing their tails

Against a fly, a solitary fly.

The Winter’s cheek flushed as if he had drained

Spring, Summer and Autumn at a draught

And smiled quietly.  But ‘twas not Winter –

Rather a season of bliss unchangable

Awakened from farm and church where it had lain

Safe under tile and thatch for ages since

This England, Old already, was called Merry.

Edward Thomas

I read this poem by Edward Thomas the other day and it seemed to describe the walk I took a couple of weeks ago in Dorset, in February, so well.  We passed a manor house.  The poem brings that picture not just of a beautiful place but of the layers of time within that place – under the thatch.  Dormant, silent layers of history. Rethatched so many times.  One layer on top of another. I often feel that when walking around Wessex. 

This season in Wessex – catkins, thin gilding beams and rills of meltwater, observed and written in this poem.  Just as it was.

Waterston Manor near Puddletown

I find the Manor house and the Manor farm some of the best places for finding a connection through those layers and finding the people of the past.

My walk in February was out from Puddletown, just east of Dorchester, taking the path alongside the recreation ground, crossing the main road on a bridge and then following the footpath down to Waterston Manor. It sits in the Piddle Valley with the river running nearby.

You can walk back in a circle, turn right on the road when you get to Waterston Manor and then right again on a footpath, although you need to walk a little on the road for a while with no pavement, a little hair-raising.  You end up back at the bridge and recreation ground.

Waterston Manor was said by Thomas Hardy to be where he set Bathsheba’s manor house, Weatherbury House, in Far from the Madding Crowd.  And it is one of those places which has the marks of its ages on it.  It suffered a fire in 1863 and remodelling in 1911, when its lovely Edwardian gardens were designed by Percy Richard Morley Horder, but it also retains a wonderful 16th century façade, complete with Renaissance niches, scallop shells, statues, pilasters, entablatures and balustrades.  The house may have originally been built by Thomas Howard in the 1580s.  It also has its English chimneys and gables (the triangular shape of the roofs on the top floor), which you see so often in the manor houses that survive: the 16th or 17th century upgrade to the earlier house of the 1300s or 1400s, by the growing-wealthier gentry class.  The Manor House is not grand enough to be a completely classical creation, a rebuild from a fantastically rich Lord.  The Manor House was often a second (or third or fourth) house of a rich landowner, or the first house of a less rich landowner – that is lord of the manor – struggling to move up in the social strata through marriage or other means.  The land of the manor could be large or small. Consequently, the house has remodellings, facades, additions, new doorways, porches, new wings etc but retains the earlier wings, buildings and structures too.  It tells the story of the families who lived there and the times it lived through.  They’re not clean structures, they’re speckled with lichen, unsymmetrical, with inconsistent windows, dark nooks and niches, symbols of lineage and marriage, and inscriptions and carvings on the facades.

Sometimes the manor house acts as the farmhouse for the manor farm, or sometimes a separate farm house has been built for the tenant farmer or bailiff.  Sometimes the manor house has been neglected, or lost to a family through bankruptcy or lack of a male family line and the buildings have descended into merely a farmhouse.

As Thomas mentions, the manor house is often right next to a church and you will often find the names of the lords of the manor, (or the squire) and their wives and children inside the church as a benefactor, someone who paid for this aisle or that chancel rebuild and certainly in the ledger tombstones.  An ancient yew in the graveyard, sometimes completes the picture of ages past.  The yew may even pre-date the church, perhaps telling us that this site was important or sacred well before there was a lord of the manor or a church.  The layers of Merry England go even below the manor house…

At Waterston, barely 200 m away, the other side of the Piddle river a large and early Roman Villa has been excavated.  Nearby there is evidence of Celtic field systems, ploughed maybe 2,200 years ago.  Tumuli or bronze age burial mounds lie to the north on a hill.  Perhaps members of old families of authority, from four thousand years ago lie beneath them.  So Waterston Manor is only the latest in a series of centres around which people, crops and animals have congregated.  Wessex was ‘Old already’ when the house was built.

The River Piddle near Waterston. February 2025

Other Manor houses that I love include the nearby Athelhampton House, just up the road from Waterston, through Puddletown.  A rather grand example, it's open to the public and you can see the 15th century hall and 16th century wing, its Martyn family symbol, the Martyn ape, in the stonework and its round, rose covered dovecote.  Only Lords of the Manor were allowed doves and dovecotes. A remembrance of the complex customs and laws which governed the medieval manor unit, and the relationship between the lord of the manor and the many people who worked on their land, tenant farmers, artisans and their families.  Each manor would have it’s own customary rights and rules and the manorial court, often held in the Manor house hall, would be the place to air any grievances, levy fines or solve a dispute to do with these rights, responsibilities and rules. As with Waterston it spent time as a farmhouse, before being rescued and restored in the late 1800s by Alfred Carte de la Fontaine.  Athelhampton House also has a relic of another manor house within it’s grounds. 

An interesting corner of Athelhampton House

Athelhampton House. The archway entrance leads to the late 1400s hall and the angled wing to the left is the 16th century addition. The wonderful oriel (projecting) window joins them at the corner. The courtyard in front was originally almost enclosed by a gatehouse, demolished in the 19th century.

The roof of the hall at Athelhampton

The oriel window from inside the Great Hall, with Martyn apes in the stained glass.

Martyn family tomb in the Martyn chapel in Puddletown church. The Martyn ape sits below the feet of the husband, top left of photo

The legality of a dovecote was the subject of a court case at Avebury Manor in Wiltshire, in the 1500s.  In this case the dovecote and house still stand – again open to the public – now owned by the National Trust.  As it is no longer a family home, they have embraced the multitude of histories of the house and manor and restored different rooms to different time periods – a fascinating look through time.  One of the rooms is decorated in 1930s style, presenting the time when Alexander Keiller, marmalade millionaire, inter-war playboy and serious archaeologist lived there while excavating the Neolithic site the house sits within – the largest stone circle in England.

Avebury Manor, Wiltshire, with stable block (now Keiller Museum) to the right

St James' church, Avebury sits next to the Manor House, behind the wall to the left

The Great Barn at Avebury, originally used for storing and threshing the crops of the Manor lands

Typically, the house sits within the shadow of St. James’ church and many of the old inhabitants are buried there.  The farm buildings, including the thatched great barn with timbers dating to the 1000’s are also close by.  Gables and chimneys again give us a picture-perfect house with all its village, land and time connections.  Neolithic ritual site, to Anglo-Saxon settlement, to medieval abbey, to middle ages manor house, to National Trust heritage site.  All sleeping beneath the thatch or in the henge ditch or under the giant beech tree…

Some more manor houses in Wessex

Inside the Old Hall, Croscombe, Somerset. Built around 1420. Now a Landmark Trust property. www.landmarktrust.org.uk

The Old Hall Croscombe, still retains its Great Hall, with medieval windows and timber ceiling

Almer in Dorset. The Manor house is privately owned and here is viewed from the churchyard.

A interior corner in Chawton House, Chawton, Hampshire. Looking out to the surrounding park and the next-door church.

Mottistone Manor, Isle of Wight. One of my favourites. Up on the hill above it stands a Neolithic standing stone. It spent years as a farmhouse, half un-used because of a landslide. Now restored.