Codreye was a 13th century great house, the foundations of which were uncovered in 2006 during work on Cowdray which replaced it 300 years later.

Opening Times

Cowdray Castle Ruins will be open to the public from the end of March to the end of October, Wednesdays to Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays, 10.30am - 4.30pm. Admission Adults - £5 Over 60s - £4.50 Children over 5 - £2.50 Children under 5 - FREE Family - £12 Tel: 01730 810781 email: info@cowdray.org.uk [CASTLES STUDY GROUP PDF FOR FULLEST ACCOUNT OF COWDRAY CASTLE] Also please refer to the Menu below for Tudor Food, Tudor Kitchens, Tudor Houses in Midhurst. Murder Mystery Novel featuring Midhurst: The Blood Dimmed Tide by Rennie Airth and historical novel featuring Cowdray Castle by Anya Seaton, Green Darkness.

 

The Building of Codreye
By Bridget Howard

The story of Codreye, the precursor to Cowdray, begins around 1267 when Sir Frank Bohun built a new house at Todham, about half a mile east of Midhurst. He and his forebears had lived at Ford near Arundel since the early 1100s. Now he decided to transfer his home to this area.

The Bohuns were people of substance who were related to members of the royal Court, but they themselves seem not to have been regular attenders of it. By a series of judicious marriages they had acquired estates all over southern England and in Ireland . Frank himself was a baronet and had served in the King's army. His first wife Sibyl was the daughter of the Earl of Derby and grand-daughter of the very powerful Earl of Pembroke. She too brought financial assets to the family.

When she died he married Nicola, widow of Bartholomew de la Chapelle. Both of them had offspring by their previous spouse. Frank had John, born 1249, and Nicola had Johanna, born 1256. In a curious double marital alliance, John married Johanna. By this, his step-mother was also his mother-in-law!

After Frank's death in 1273, the house at Todham became Nicola's dower, legally hers for the rest of her life unless she remarried, which she did not.

Johanna's Discontent
When Frank moved to Todham, he gave the house at Ford to his eldest son, John. The need to provide for him and his wife may have been one of the reasons for building a new property. There was obviously no question of either family occupying the old house on St Ann 's Hill.

Reading between the lines, it can be imagined that Johanna got very discontented after Frank's death. First, they were a long way from her mother who was now living on her own at Todham. The journey from Ford to see her was very tedious. Secondly, why were she and John occupying an old-fashioned property when Nicola had a modern one? They were people of importance who should be seen to have a home appropriate to their position in society. Possibly thirdly, she wanted to move away from the surveyance of their overlord, the Earl of Arundel.

Eventually, bowing to the inevitable, John began to make plans for the building of a new house near the Rother on his lands just outside Midhurst, close but not too close to his mother-in-law. He named it Codreye, this being Norman-French for the nearby hazelwood. However, his and Johanna's ideas were too grandiose for his disposable income. He had to resort to all kinds of stratagems to pay for their replacement home.

The Cost of Codreye
Today there is no visible trace of the house and only a very small part of its foundations have been discovered. A full excavation must await both opportunity and funding.

The house was very isolated, well away from the old town of Midhurst on its hill-top. There were no houses on the lane to Easebourne. A causeway led across the water meadows, drained by the now silted-up stream, crossed by an earlier version of the first bridge. (This was rebuilt in the 16th century.) A drawbridge protected the house and could be raised to prevent evildoers from crossing the river. Inside this was a wall with gates. The site would have been very wet in winter unless Codreye had been built on an artificial mound, bringing the ground floor above the flood level. This had been done on the marshlands at Ford and might also have been done here. Archaeologists say that the later Cowdray house was raised in this way by tons of earth and gravel.

We do not know exactly when Sir John began building, but by 1276 he was desperately seeking money from all possible sources.

In that July he sold back to the King both the Serjeantry of the Chapel Royal (which Johanna had inherited from her father) and the office of Spigurnels. This latter was the sealer of writs in chancery and was an office of profit, albeit over a period. John however needed cash in hand.

He initiated long-term tenancies of his estates in Buckinghamshire, in Ireland and in Dorset . Unfortunately, in his haste, he neglected to obtain the necessary royal licence to alienate the last of these and was fined. The disposals continued. He enfeoffed his land at Newtimber and at Rustington. In 1278 he sold the lordship of the Manor of Midhurst. There was now little else to bring him money.

In desperation he paid 500 marks (about £1,660) for the guardianship of the heirs of the Earl Marshall. The custody, and the income from the lands, would have been very lucrative in the long term, but it was a misjudgement. This was an investment, not the immediate source of the cash that he needed so much. It was a waste of his dangerously stretched resources. He borrowed from his friends and neighbours large sums that he had no hope of repaying, nor did he make any provision for settling with them later.

Eventually, with the building now completed and his creditors pressing, he had only one option. That was to sell all his remaining estates. On 4 July 1284 he handed over everything (except the leased Irish lands) to the enormously wealthy Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham; the estates to revert after the Bishop's death.

On 28 September, three months later, Sir John died.

Anthony Bek was one of the richest men in the kingdom. John surrendered to him the lands at Midhurst/Easebourne, Ford, Rustington and Lincolnshire with all the assets appertaining to them, except for an annual payment to him and his heirs of £230 for the manor of Ford. The lump sum he received is not recorded, but was obviously sufficient to pay the outstanding bills.

We cannot calculate the cost of building Codreye, but it was very great, both in terms of cash and by the suffering it brought to the family.

Johanna Alone
The agreement with the Bishop could of course not affect the customary one-third of the property which formed Johanna's dower. When the legal dust had settled she was left with some land around Ford and the house at Codreye. She lived there with her two daughters and her eldest son, John, who died in 1297. The second son, James, his wife and family lived at Todham with Nicola until her death and continued to do so thereafter. Bishop Bek came to Midhurst once, in late 1310.

A notable event was the visit in June 1305 of King Edward I. After several days at Codreye he was joined by his lawless son Prince Edward who, with his friend Piers Gaveston, had been poaching deer on the Bishop of Chester's land. This was the latest in a series of offences and in a rage the King refused to give him any more money. Hoping to be forgiven, the Prince stayed on at Codreye until his royal father left for Chichester . He then trailed behind the entourage and was not restored to favour for another month until the progress reached Canterbury .

This is yet another indication of the Bohuns' social status, despite the bankruptcy. It also illustrates the grandeur of Codreye which could accommodate a royal visit.

The Debts Rebound
Bishop Bek died in 1311. Due to a series of family tragedies, the estates only came back into the Bohuns' possession in 1223 when John's grandson came of age. Johanna remained at Codreye until her death in 1228.

In the years between John's demise in 1284 and 1321 the lands were subject to a series of six separate attacks, plus another on the Bishop's palace at Eltham. These were too many, too deliberate and over too long a period to be mere vandalism.

The most likely explanation is that they were aimed at the recovery of debts incurred by Sir John which his widow showed no inclination to acknowledge or repay. Those who were owed money were taking matters into their own hands with thefts of timber from the woodlands and goods from Codreye; they also destroyed parts of the disused house on St Ann 's Hill. Significantly, two of the trespassers were affluent local landowners, certainly well known to the Bohuns. The Earl of Arundel was also implicated, an accusation that he robustly denied.

Codreye remained in the Bohuns' possession until it was replaced in the 1530s/40s by the Tudor palace of Cowdray .

Bridget Howard is Editor of the Midhurst Society

The last "license to crenrellate" was issued to Sir William Fitzwilliam for Cowdray Castle in 1533

[MIDHURST HOME] [ TUDOR HOUSE] [ TUDOR KITCHENS] [COWDRAY CASTLE RUINS]
[TUDOR WALLED GARDEN] [ TUDOR INGLENOOK] [MIDHURST SOCIETY] [TUDORS FOOD]

' The Cowdray Castle Ruins Page " is sponsored by Violet Designs, Midhurst, West Sussex Tel: 01730 810059. We just try harder to give exceptional service and prices.

 

.