Chicksands Priory up to 1721

Chicksands Priory was founded in the 1150s by Rohisa, widow of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, and wife of Payn Beauchamp. Chicksands was a Gilbertine house with male canons serving a community of nuns. The present house represents the canons’ cloister. To the north of it lay the church and to the north of that lay the nuns’ cloister, conforming to the layout prescribed by Gilbert of Sempringham in his “Order”. The nuns and canons were kept totally apart with a stone partition between them dividing the church in two.

The arrangement of the rooms in the surviving cloister in the Middle Ages is not completely clear. A drain leading from the south-west corner of the house to the nearby stream indicates that the rere-dorter and by implication the dorter were in the west side of the cloister rather than the more usual east. On the south side of the cloister was the frater with kitchens, no doubt attached. The use of the east side is more problematical but could have included the Prior's rooms in the centre with accommodation for the lay brothers. It is suggested that the chapter house lay to the east of the present house.

On the Dissolution in 1538, Chicksands passed to the Snow family who demised it to Peter Osborn and his son John in 1576. The freehold was conveyed in 1587. From a seventeenth century plan6 it would seem the Osborns used existing rooms rather than undertaking wholesale alteration. The entrance hall was on the east, the new chapel at the south-east corner and the dining room, possibly the old frater, above a number of small “chambers”. A store house was part of the west range. S. and N. Buck's engraving of 17307 shows that externally Chicksands remained unchanged from mediaeval times.

Inventory of Chicksands 1721

The death in 1720 within a few months of each other of Sir John Osborn and his heir, also called John, meant control of the estate passed to Sarah Osborn, a Byng of Southill, during the long minority of her son, Sir Danvers, 3rd Baronet. In 1721 the house was leased to Hildebrand Jacob of St. Anne’s, Westminster, on a year-to-year tenancy at a rent of £50 p.a. The inventory is important as it shows Chicksands prior to the major alterations of the eighteenth century.