A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



Hamble. At Sarisbury there are two or three inns, 

 a church, a schoolhouse, and a few cottages standing 

 round a stretch of village green, along the north side 

 of which runs the Southampton road. Swanwick is 

 merely a collection of modern red-brick cottages 

 straggling up the stretch of hill which leads from the 

 railway station to the Southampton road. Lower 

 Swanwick is a picturesque village lying on low ground 

 along the east bank of the Hamble. Brooklands, a large 

 house on the Hamble River, is the residence of Lt.-Col. 

 Babington, J.P., and Cold East, south of the main 

 road, belongs to Mr. Claude Montefiore. Sarisbury 

 Court is the residence of Mr. W. Sarton. Curbridge 

 is a tiny hamlet in the north of the parish. 



Hill Head consisted, till lately, of a few cottages and 

 fishermen's sheds at Titchfield Haven, but is now 

 developing into a seaside resort with rows of houses 

 along the shore. Chillinge is a desolate-looking 

 house of Elizabethan date, now cut up into two 

 cottages, standing alone by the seashore a little to the 

 east of Hook. Hook House Park, east of the 

 parish of Hook with Warsash, is well wooded, but a 

 large tract of bare heather land stretches from there to 

 Warsash. A great part of it is now being brought 

 under cultivation as strawberry ground. Hook House, 

 built by Mr. William Hornby, governor of Bombay, 

 at the end of the eighteenth century, which was 

 a reproduction of Government House, Bombay, was 

 burnt down a few years ago. From Warsash House, 

 the property of G. A. Shinley, the road descends a sharp 

 hill to the shore where, by the Crab and Lobster inn, 

 the crab tank of the well-known local industry is built. 

 The village of Warsash is small, and its inhabitants 

 are chiefly employed in the crab and lobster trade, 

 which occupies them through the late autumn, winter, 

 and spring, many of them in the summer working as 

 sailors on the many yachts which make their head 

 quarters in the Solent and Southampton Water. 



The remains of the buildings of the Premonstra- 

 tensian abbey of St. Mary, Titchfield, stand at a little 

 distance to the north of the town. Founded in 1222 

 for a colony of White Canons from Halesowen, the 

 ruins show that the church and claustral buildings 

 were completed within a few years of the foundation, 

 and, as far as can be judged, survived without material 

 alteration till the suppression. The note in the 

 register of the abbey (Harl. 6602, fbl. 1403) men- 

 tioning that John bishop of Elphin, eighteenth abbot, 

 f. 1535, rebuilt the ruinous church, may refer to 

 work done in the now destroyed east end. The 

 church had an aisleless nave, a central tower, transepts 

 with eastern chapels, and a presbytery, the whole 

 being vaulted in stone. The cloister lay on the north 

 of the church, the parlour, chapter-house, and warm- 

 ing house being on the east, and the dorter over them, 

 extending with its subvault a considerable distance 

 northwards ; the frater with its subvault on the north, 

 having the kitchen at its west end, and the cellarer's 

 building and great guest hall on the west. The site 

 of the infirmary is uncertain. The only parts of the 

 church now standing are the nave walls and the 

 lower part of the west wall of the south transept. 

 The nave was vaulted in six bays, each bay being 

 lighted by a pair of tall lancets, below the sills of 

 which ran a moulded string at which the vaulting shafts 

 stopped. The pulpitum seems to have stood in the 

 west arch of the tower, with the east doorway from 

 the cloister immediately to the west of it. Part of 



the west cloister door is also preserved, and in the 

 western bay of the nave on the south is a third door- 

 way, built up, but retaining a consecration cross on 

 its east jamb. There was also a west doorway, and 

 in the western angles of the nave were vices entered 

 from within the church, their blocked doorways being 

 yet to be seen. The church was entirely faced with 

 wrought stone, and had a battering plinth, the bays 

 being marked off by projecting buttresses. In the 

 west wall were probably three tall lancets, the outer 

 jambs of the northern and southern of which still 

 remain. The arrangement of the eastern part of 

 the church as shown on the separate plate was de- 

 duced from excavations undertaken by the Rev. G. 

 W. Minns, with the help of Mr. W. H. St. J. Hope. 

 The chapter-house, which was separated from the 

 north transept by the inner parlour, was vaulted in 

 two bays, with a vestibule of two bays opening to the 

 cloister by a central doorway with clustered Purbcck 

 marble shafts, and flanked by double openings with 

 marble shafts and sills, parts of which yet remain 

 blocked up in the wall. The doorway to a passage 

 east of the frater remains, with a little of the frater 

 wall, but beyond this nothing is left to show the 

 details of the monastic buildings, except the traces of 

 a barrel vault which covered the outer parlour in the 

 western range against the north wall of the church. 



The abbey was granted at the suppression to 

 Thomas Wriothesley, who converted the buildings 

 into a house for himself, a good deal of which still 

 remains. The process of conversion is illustrated by 

 a very interesting series of letters among the State 

 Papers, which have been printed by Mr. Hope in the 

 Archaeological Journal for Dec. 1906. After several 

 schemes of adaptation had been proposed and aban- 

 doned, the monastic frater became the hall, and the 

 chapter-house the chapel ; the cloister being treated 

 as the courtyard of a four-square house. The south 

 side of the church became the main front, and a large 

 gateway with octagonal angle turrets was planted 



V- 



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THE GATEWAY, PLACE HOUSE, TITCHFIELD 



222 



