Boston Manor House

About

Boston Manor House is an English Jacobean manor house built in 1622 with internal alterations, intensively restored in later centuries. It was the manor house of one of the early medieval-founded manors in Middlesex. Since 1965 the manor's small part of the parish of Hanwell has been part of the London Borough of Hounslow in west London. Boston Manor Park is the publicly owned green space, including a lake, which adjoins the house. The earliest reference to Boston (or Bordwadestone as it was then spelled) was around the 1170s. Bordwad has not been identified with a group of people or physical feature and so it is assumed the first part of this word means Bord's. The final part of the word is the common ending i.e. farmstead. It was towards the northern end its lands — its manor. The Lord of the manor is recorded as Ralph de Brito. There is no record as to where he built his manor house. He founded a chapel dedicated to St. Lawrence in the south of the manor on a site that is now derelict. The ecclesiastical boundary under this chapel was — or became over time — conterminous with the manor boundary. The approximate four boundaries were the Piccadilly line from the east end of Boston Manor Underground station's sidings to the Brent, the Brent down to the Thames, the Thames to Half Acre Road, and Boston Manor Road. The northern extent of the manor was marked by a boundary stone. Later a tree to the west of it came to be the local Gospel Oak. Here the old pagan custom of blessing the field and crops took place whilst beating the bounds. Thus, the boundary of chapelry of St. Lawrence coexisted with that of the manor. It was a part of the parish of Hanwell until moved into Brentford. Then in about 1280, Edward I granted this area of the township to the prioress of St Helen's Bishopsgate. It is at this point Boston became a recognised rural settlement. The prioress received what amounted to "constructive possession" and ownership. The King did this to make raising tax easier and it had the benefit of deterring alienation of part, a process then called subinfeudation, keeping the land together until the dissolution of the monasteries. The King may have favoured this particular Convent in Bishopsgate because it was full of the unmarried daughters of members of the Guild of Goldsmiths, and so by making them self-supporting by giving them the means to charge their new tenants rents and to sell the produce grown on their newly acquired demesne, he could justify taxing their fathers more heavily and collect the tax in the form of silver coinage, which was more convenient. In 1539, Henry VIII's national reforms saw the convent dissolved and the manor (including its holdings) returned to the Crown. The Crown granted the lands in or shortly before 1547 to Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset during the reign of Edward VI. When the Duke was beheaded, his lands were forfeited under the Counter-Reformation of Mary I to The Crown until Elizabeth I granted it to her favourite Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester who immediately sold it to Sir Thomas Gresham, an internationally wealthy merchant and financier who had also bought Osterley as his summer residence. He later founded the Royal Exchange. As Gresham died without issue, the property went to his stepson Sir William Reade who lived in Osterley so had to obtain a Patent of Possession in 1610 from James I so that he could inherit. He married Mary Goldsmith, who immediately after his death built Boston Manor House in 1622–1623. She then married Sir Edward Spencer of Althorp, who therefore gained the equitable ownership and who appears to have bought out the claim of the late William Reade's heirs so that upon her death in 1658 the lands passed to her heir John Goldsmith. In 1670 his executors sold

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.