October 31, 2024|Reports

“The Manor of Wickham – Part 2”

Fittingly for a talk on the Manor of Wickham our first meeting of the autumn season of Wickham History Society talks took place at Rookesbury House by kind permission of the Rookesbury estate. Just under a hundred Wickham History Society members and Carpenter Garnier family descendants attended on September 24th to hear Geoff Phillpotts complete his history of the manor of Wickham by covering the period from 1699 to the sale of much of the manor in the twentieth century.

In 1699 it looked as though the manor might not survive at all as half was sold off by the 3rd Earl of Carlisle to help fund the building of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. It was saved only through the intervention of a London shipowner, Jonathan Rashleigh, the fourth son of a well established Cornish family. Jonathan needed a landed estate as part of his marriage arrangement with a wealthy London banking family and Wickham fitted the bill. In a series of purchases between the1720s and 1750s Jonathan reunited the whole manor, extended the old manor house and even named one of his ships Wickham.

The Rashleigh family held the manor for less than fifty years as Jonathan’s son, Philip, had to sell the manor in the late 1750’s. The new owners were the Garniers, a wealthy Huguenot family, originally protestant refugees from France. They held the manor for over a hundred and fifty years and expanded it to probably its largest ever size, as well as building their new country house at Rookesbury.

Hard times came in the late nineteenth century when both farming and forestry were badly hit by foreign imports and new technologies – farm rents fell by a fifth in just ten years and traditional industries like coppicing declined. Heavy losses in North American investments meant the family had to mortgage Rookesbury. A major sale of manor land took place in 1928 and The Square was sold to the local district council for £1 in the 1930s. Nonetheless the family, through the Rookesbury Estate company, still own Rookesbury House and surrounding farmland and forestry in Wickham today – almost a thousand years since the Norman manor was created in the eleventh century.