Newsletter 44 - Autumn 2005

Baigens, Chawton: a note on its architectural history

Edward Roberts

Baigens is a large and important village house of the early or mid-16th century. Its size, good workmanship and materials, its former continuous jetty along the street frontage and its outstanding wall paintings, all mark it out as a house to do credit to a prosperous yeoman or clothier. It was built as a four-bay house: a parlour bay to the east, then a heated hall bay, followed by a bay containing the hearth-passage and the chimney stack, and finally a service room at the original west end.

Thus, it has a classic, hearth-passage plan.  In other words, a passage between two opposing doors originally crossed the house behind the hearth. The hearth itself backed onto the passage on one side and heated the hall on the other. The hall was up-to-date for its time in that it was floored over with a chamber above. It is a splendid room and still gives an idea of the colour of interior decoration in larger houses of the early or mid-16th century.  Here one sees the close-studding – a high-status display feature – that originally ran all along the front of the house.  At the high end of the hall, the vertical studs retain dowel-holes where the high bench was once fixed. Paintings of a dog, deer and rabbit in a rural landscape and the monogram ‘IHS’ decorate two walls.

In the absence of dendrochronology, the house cannot be precisely dated.  The ‘IHS’ monogram could imply catholic leanings, in which case it is unlikely to post-date by many years Elizabeth’s accession in 1558. This may be the reason for the suggested date-range for the paintings of 1525-1575[1]. Hearth-passage houses have been dated in Hampshire between 1486 and 1564.  They are invariably high-quality houses, typically belonging to yeomen farmers or prosperous merchants. The large, curved wall braces, however, would be unlikely to post-date c.1550.

What makes Baigens of even greater interest is Jane Hurst’s research, which identifies the owners or lessees of the house during the period when it was probably built. This research turns on the fact that the property was acquired by William Symonds of Winchester who, in his will of 1606, left Baigens and other property to the Mayor, Bailiffs and Commonality of Winchester ‘for the relief of six poor aged people of the said city’. The Charity retained Baigens until it was bought by Edward Knight in 1869 and its records survive making it possible to trace ownership through to the present day and also backwards from 1606 to the late-15th century[2].

NOTES

1. E. Lewis, Hampshire Field Club Historic Buildings Newsletter, vol 2. pp. 2-6, Sept 1983.
2. pers comm. Jane Hurst.

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