HOUSE IN PETERSFIELD 6s 



John Goodyer's time, "The Great House". The word 

 "great" was not synonymous with "big"; it simply meant 

 of chief importance'.^ In April 191 7 a tablet was im- 

 bedded in the brickwork of the front of the house : 

 JOHN' GOODYER 

 Botanist and Royalist 

 (1592-1664) 

 lived here. 



In August last I made a pilgrimage to Petersfield to see 

 the house. The two-gabelled front facing the Spain was 

 a disappointment : it has been altered out of recognition 

 by the substitution of sash windows for the old casements : 

 Goodyer would not know it. To south and west there are 

 still a few of the origfinal features. On the south an old 

 doorway, with stone jambs and flat-pointed arch-stone dated 

 *'755'' leading out ipto the garden, is almost certainly 

 the orig^inal front door to the house. The old mullioned 

 windows, with splayed jambs of red brick, have mostly 

 been covered with wall-tiling, though several, now walled 

 up, are an architectural feature in the small yard at the 

 back of the house. Perhaps the window-tax may have 

 been the cause of the blocking of the windows, and the 

 utility of their embrasures inside, when fitted as cupboards, 

 may have led to some hesitation in reopening them. 



Within the house there is much to delight the antiquary. 

 The heavy oak beams crossing the ceilings, the uneven 

 floors of thick and broad oak planks, the broad slanting 

 corbels close under the ceilings, which support the hearth- 

 stones above, and many other details, all help him to 

 reopen in his mind the old windows whose splays and 

 mullions he sees in the walls, and to think away the thin 

 partitions that now subdivide the rooms in which Goodyer 

 had his library, and where he worked and wrote. 



Of unusual interest is the old stairway, a square brick 

 and stone built structure at the back of the house, formerly 

 lit on two sides by small windows, now blocked up, placed 



^ M. E, Wotton, yo/m Goodyer in Hants and Sussex News, II April 1917- 



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