Sulgrave Manor
Manor Road
Sulgrave
Nr. Banbury
Oxfordshire
OX17 2SD
United Kingdom
+44 (0)1295 760205
Charity No. 1003839 |
The house through the Centuries
Sulgrave Manor. |
Sulgrave Manor is a small manor-house, built by a Lancashireman
born at Warton about 1500.
The shabby farmhouse that was bought in 1914 was smaller
than the house that Lawrence Washington built.
The parts which remain of his house are to the south,
the porch and screens passage and the Great Hall on the
ground floor, the Great Chamber and two smaller rooms
above. Today there is a west wing, containing the Director's
quarters, constructed at the restoration completed in
1929. The frontage in Tudor times was considerably wider
than it is today. The porch was, as now, central. To the
west was the kitchen and buttery, to the east the Great
Chamber and more. It is not now possible to tell how far
the house extended in either direction, but in 1920 a
huge boulder, which could have been a foundation stone,
was dug up about fifty feet to the west of the present
house, and others were found in a line with the existing
frontage. Moreover, the present exterior wall at the east
end of the Tudor building will be seen to have been an
inside wall. A Tudor pattern fireplace shows itself at
first floor level, with, above it, the projecting oak
purlins, sawn through between 1700 and 1780 at the time
when parts of the house, for reasons unknown, were pulled
down. Parts of the Tudor house, which Robert, the builder's
son, had enlarged, had already been destroyed by 1700,
when John Hodges built the north wing which runs at right
angles to the Tudor portion and contains at ground level
the Oak Parlour and Great Kitchen and, above, the Chintz
and White Bedrooms.
The local limestone of which the house is built is not
dissimilar from that of the Cotswold country. The roofs
are both stone-tiled, the pitch of the Tudor roof being
steeper than that of the north wing. The Elizabethan red-brick
chimney stacks are characteristically set at an angle,
in contrast with the Queen Anne chimney stacks of solid
stone with a projecting base.
The south porch showing the intriguing
armorials essayed
in pargiting - probably a typical Tudor "pun"
by
Lawrence Washington, his second wife's maiden
name being Pargiter! |
The entrance to the house in Tudor times was by the porch
at the south. It was added by Lawrence Washington after
he had completed his south front, and above the doorway
he had placed, in plaster, the royal arms and the initials
ER for Elizabeth Regina. Of these arms little more can
be seen now than the heraldic supporters, a lion crowned
and a dragon, together with a fleur-de-lys and Tudor rose.
Above the arms, near the gable, is a triangular device
with small birds on either side; and the plasterer, covertly
illustrating the source of his own wages, added on the
left a lop-eared sheep with falling collar and on the
right a lamb wearing an Elizabethan ruff. The sheep, the
lamb and the birds have tiny pieces of charcoal for their
eyes.
In the spandrels of the doorway were carved the arms of
the builder's family, three mullets (stars) and two bars
(stripes); not unnaturally, it has been held that here
is the origin of the design of the American flag. The
arms are to be seen quite clearly in the right-hand spandrel.
Those in the left were 'differenced' by a crescent beneath
the bars, indicating descent from a second son (the builders
grandfather was the second son ' of Robert Washington
of Warton), but they have long been indecipherable.
Between the royal arms and the doorway is another representation,
in plaster, of the Washington arms, quite modern, and
replacing some device the nature of which had become unknown
by the eighteenth century. The north courtyard, formed
by the Tudor and Queen Anne wings and the gabled end of
a building used formerly as a brewhouse and a barn, contains
three stone doorways, one leading into the kitchen, one
into the Great Hall and one in the south east corner.
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