1 Gillam, Geoffrey, Forty Hall, Enfield, 1629–1997 (Enfield, 1997), p. 10.Google Scholar

2 Rainton first clashed with the Crown in 1633 when he was Lord Mayor. In that year the Crown attempted to prosecute Rainton and the group of City Puritans he headed in an attempt to prevent their practice of purchasing impropriated ecclesiastical revenues and applying them to godly causes ( Ashton, Robert, The City and the Court 1603–1643 (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 193–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). In 1639 Rainton refused to lend money to Charles I and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea for five days in 1640 for failing to furnish the King with a list of possible contributors for a forced loan. This enthusiasm seems, however, to have waned before hostilities broke out. In 1642 he turned down the offer of a place on the Committee of Safety (a parliamentary committee responsible for the militia for London) and in July of that year was a member of the Court of Alderman that refused to allow Parliament to appoint a new Lord Mayor to replace the current one, Gurney, a personal friend and Royalist sympathizer (Gillam, Forty Hall, p. 10).

3 The building is dated by an external brick near ground level at the north-east corner incised with the year 1629. The same date is incorporated into the decorative plaster ceiling in the south-east room on the first floor. This evidence proves that the house was roofed in by the summer of that year, and therefore work must have started at least a year beforehand. A second brick, dated 1632 and now lost, is recorded by the nineteenth-century antiquarian William Robinson as formerly standing near the top of the building ( Robinson, William, The History and Antiquities of Enfield, 2 vols (London, 1823), I, p. 239 Google Scholar). This probably marked the final completion of the building with all its embellishments.

4 Cherry, Bridget and Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Buildings of England; London 4: North (London, 1998), p. 437 Google Scholar; White, Adam, ‘Burman, Thomas (1617/18–1674’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).Google Scholar

5 Other examples of this type include Lower Slaughter Manor, Gloucestershire (1656) and Hall Barn, Buckinghamshire (1656) ( Mowl, Timothy and Earnshaw, Brian, Architecture without Kings (Manchester, 1995), p. 142).Google Scholar

6 Cooper, Nicholas, Houses of the Gentry 1480–1680 (London, 1999), p. 201 Google Scholar; Beard, Geoffrey, Decorative Plasterwork in Great Britain (London, 1975), pl. 9.Google Scholar

7 The house is attributed to Jones in the 1787 sale particulars (London Metropolitan Archive ACC/0801/44). This link is repeated by Robinson in 1823 (Robinson, Enfield, I, p. 239). As late as 1925 Lloyd attributed the gateway to the stable courtyard to Inigo Jones ( Lloyd, Nathaniel, A History of English Brickwork (London, 1925, citations from Woodbridge, 1983 edn). p. 318 Google Scholar).

8 Gomme, Andor, ‘Chevening: The Big Issues’, The Georgian Group Journal, 14 (2004), pp. 167–87 (pp. 171–75).Google Scholar

9 Nicholas Rainton II died in 1696 without male heirs. The estate was inherited by his daughter Mary, who had married Sir John Wolstenholme. On Sir John’s death it passed to his son, Nicholas. Nicholas died in 1716 and his widow, Grace, married William Ferdinand Carey, Lord Hunsdon. On Grace’s death in 1729 the hall passed to Sir Nicholas’ nieces and co-heirs, Elizabeth and Mary (Gillam, Forty Hall, pp. 10–11). The refurbishment works are dated to 1708 by lead hopper heads on the building bearing the date 1708 and the initials W. G. M. (W and G probably stand for Wolsenholme and Grace, the M may have been a misreading by Robinson of an ‘N’ for Nicholas) recorded by Robinson (Robinson, Enfield, 1, pp. 235, 237). Wolstenholme’s refurbishment works may have been occasioned by a fire that appears to have damaged the northern half of the building. Smoke-staining can be observed throughout the roof structure and in the floor structure of the northern half of the building. There is, however, little evidence of structural damage; the fire seems to have provided a timely opportunity to modernize the house to meet changing requirements.

10 The 1787 estate particulars refer to the plasterwork in the north hall and the accompanying map depicts the estate largely in its current form (London Metropolitan Archive ACC/0801/44).

11 ‘Forty Hall Enfield’, Meyer’s Observer and Local Advertiser, 27 August 1897.

12 The commissioning of the conservation plan followed recent scholarly interest in the building. This included an SAHGB study day in 1999, subsequent recording and analysis by Andrew Wittrick (then of English Heritage), and Elain Harwood’s 2007 account of Forty Hall and Tyttenhanger ( Harwood, Elain, ‘Forty Hall and Tyttenhanger’, in The Renaissance villa in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Airs, Malcolm and Tyack, Geroffrey (Reading, 2007), pp. 206–22).Google Scholar

13 The roof is of a butt-purlin type typical of the seventeenth century and incorporating a large proportion of re-used timbers.

14 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pl. 194.

15 Ibid., pl. 290.

16 Lee Prosser and Lucy Worsley, ‘Kew Palace’, in The Renaissance Villa in Britain, pp. 180–91 (p. 190).

17 Two divisions in the present lawn, running south and east from the south-east corner of the house, indicate that the area to the south and east of the house was originally likely to have been laid out as a formal garden of rectangular enclosures and terraces.

18 Martin Dearne, ‘Archaeological Excavation Adjacent to the East Wall of Forty Hall, Forty Hill, Enfield, 2005’, Enfield Archaeological Society report, site code FYH05 (2005); Martin Dearne, ‘Archaeological Excavation Adjacent to the East Wall of Forty Hall, Forty Hill, Enfield, March 2006’, Enfield Archaeological Society report site code FYI06 (2006).

19 One of the original partitions at second-floor level is cut by a current window opening.

20 The framing of the central arch of the screen can be seen in the floor void above and appears primary (although the arch has been shifted in its frame by approximately 100 mm at a later date). Decoration on the cross-passage side, which is now backed by a partition wall, is also visible in the floor void.

21 The chimney is clearly an insertion as it cuts the primary roof structure. The brickwork of the stack is eighteenth-century in character.

22 The close string and vase balusters of the service stair are early eighteenth-century in character. The upper flight remains unaltered but the lower flights have been altered with the moving of the bottom flight slightly to the south in order to allow the creation of a passage to the service court. Plain stick balusters connected with these associations suggest a date of c. 1800. A set of empty mortises and the dimensions of the lower flights confirms that they originally followed the same pattern as the unaltered upper flight.

23 A bread oven is suggested by the mass of brickwork next to the south-east corner of the kitchen chimneystack. This is a hollow stack of brickwork reaching to first-floor level and supporting the floor above with an inserted ceiling. The purpose of this is unknown, but, given the lack of smoke-staining, the most likely explanation is that the lower part housed a bread oven. The serving place is suggested by the presence of a mortise slot in the east wall of this space. This space was clearly continuous with the cross passage, as both areas share the same deep joists designed to take a flat ceiling. Serving places such as this frequently occur in the plans of John Thorpe, for instance in a plan of Canons House dated 1604–06 ‘The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe’, (ed. John Summerson), Walpole Society, 40 (1966), pl. 20).

24 The small newel stair is suggested by a small space to the west of the kitchen chimneystack spanned with secondary floor timbers inserted into an unbroken layer of plaster through the first-floor void.

25 The primary decorative ceilings have been attributed to Edward Stanyon (d. 1631) by Claire Gapper (Claire Gapper, ‘Plasterers and Plasterwork in City, Court and Country, c. 1530-c. 1640’ (Doctoral thesis, University of London, 1998), pp. 583–643).

26 The ceiling in this ‘closet’ would still be flat since the space was confined to a single structural bay. This change in joist thickness is now only visible in the first-floor void. The addition of firing pieces has been used to create a flat ceiling in the south-western room.

27 The framing for these fireplaces is visible in the floor structure.

28 Canted ceilings are formed by the structural sloping soffits of the rafters and completed by falsework on the remaining sides.

29 The north-west extension is dated to this year by an incised brick at ground-floor level.

30 The service range probably originally comprised a brewhouse or bakehouse, stables and coach house, and barn. A 1937 photograph (National Monuments Record, photographs associated with the RCHM England survey ref. M.K.52) shows an apparently primary chimneystack at the east end of the south range, suggesting a brewhouse or bakehouse. The west end of this range is shown in a mid-twentieth-century survey plan (London Metropolitan Archive ACC /3499 / EH / 02 /124 A345 /15 A) as a stable. The height of the original first floor in this area, the offset for which is still visible, and the high-level door in the gable wall, suggest that it was designed as a stable with a hayloft above.

31 Gillam, Forty Hall, p. 10; much of the timber in these ranges appears to have been re-used. Tie-beams from the roof have yielded an estimated felling date 1458–1503 ( Bridge, Martin, ‘Tree-Ring Date Lists, 1997’, Vernacular Architecture, 28 (1997), pp. 135–37 (p. 135)Google Scholar).

32 Gillam, Forty Hall, p. 15; Colvin, Howard, The History of the Kings Works, 6 vols (London, 1982), IV, p. 89.Google Scholar

33 Patricia Smith, ‘Plain English or Anglo-Palladian? Seventeenth-Century Country Villa Plans’, in The Renaissance Villa in Britain, pp. 89–110 (p. 98).

34 Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (London, 1995), p. 656.Google Scholar

35 Colvin, Dictionary of British Architects, p. 656.

36 Summerson, John, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 164.Google Scholar

37 Girouard, Mark, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (London, 1983), p. 248 Google Scholar; ‘The Smythson Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects’, (ed. Mark Girouard), Architectural History, v (1962), pp. 23–184 (p. 141).

38 Gomme, ‘Chevening’, p. 175.

39 A good early example of the compressed courtyard type is Wickham Court in Kent (1490–1500) (Summerson, ‘Thorpe’, pl. 80). Pishiobury Park, Sawbridgeworth, Herfordshire (1550–1600), is remarkably similar ( Smith, John, English Houses 1200–1800, The Hertfordshire Evidence (London, 1992), p. 57 Google Scholar). Isolated examples are to be found until the middle of the seventeenth century, for example at Bridge Place, Kent (1659) (Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings, p. 147).

40 Andor Gomme, ‘Halls into Vestibules’, in The Renaissance Villa in Britain, pp. 38–63 (pp. 40, 44).