Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester and founder of Titchfield Abbey

Peter des Roches was a very powerful figure in early 13^th century England. He hitched his star to the fortunes of King John and held the highest offices of state as well as being the very rich Bishop of Winchester. Towards the end of his life he founded the abbeys at Titchfield and Netley as well as a small priory at Selborne. He also founded Hales abbey in Worcestershire (the parent house of Titchfield) and Clarté Dieu in Touraine.

He was born in Touraine, possibly at Château-du-Loir at an unknown date. We might infer that he was born between 1170 and 1175. The family was a powerful one in the region and a brother or possibly a cousin, Guillaume des Roches (d. 1222), was seneschal of Anjou and one of the leading figures in the government of Philip Augustus, king of France. Peter, as a younger son, would not inherit any land and had to chart his own path through life.

He did not initially join the church and in his youth was better known as a warrior. Roger of Wendover, the chronicler, remarked that in his youth des Roches had been better versed in how to lay siege to a castle than in preaching the word of God and it is apparent that this military reputation stayed with him throughout his career.

He first comes to notice in 1197 as a witness to a charter by Richard I. The detail of this is irrelevant but it does show that des Roches was already a significant man at court during Richard’s late reign. He was appointed prior of Loches, dean of St Martin’s at Angers and treasurer of the collegiate church of St Hilaire at Poitiers. These were all offices that would yield him income while the actual duties were performed by men at these various sites. He was clearly a capable administrator and after Richard’s death in 1199 he attached himself to King John who rewarded him handsomely.

After the loss of Normandy in 1203 Peter des Roches crossed the channel with King John and was a leading member of John’s household. was rewarded with a rich haul of benefices, including the churches of Cave, Hales, Kirby Misperton, and possibly Dartford, a prebend and the office of precentor in Lincoln Cathedral, and a perpetual vicarage at Bamburgh. In April 1204 he was granted the right to dispose of prebends and rents within the vacant see of Chichester, and following the death of Bishop Godfrey de Lucy in September 1204, was proposed as the king's candidate for the vastly wealthy see of Winchester. His election was disputed and it took almost two years of wrangling and the intervention of the Pope before he was enthroned as Bishop in March 1206. Des Roches was now one of the most powerful figures in England.

He had skills in finance and exacting taxes that John, who was keen on administrative affairs, keenly appreciated. John also trusted him to bring up his eldest son Henry (later Henry III) from 1212. He was appointed Regent in 1214 while John made an expedition to Poitou. Naturally he supported John during the civil and for his pains lost his role as justice after the signing of Magna Carta in 1215.

After John’s death in 1216, des Roches was able to return to power as a supporter of the young king. A significant number of barons recognised Prince Louis of France as their king but the royal party prevailed and at the Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1216, the warrior-bishop led a contingent of crossbow men who, it is said, were instrumental in winning the day. Des Roches also took many prisoners and greatly enriched himself by the ransoms.

He was now once more at the centre of government although he had to struggle against the preferences of other powerful barons, most notably Hubert de Burgh, as as de Burgh had greater support from the Council, des Roches decided to step down in 1220. 

It is one of the oddities of the Middle Ages that is sometime hard for us to understand, that men who were plainly secular in their daily approach to life could still be conventionally pious. Thus des Roches took himself off on a pilgrimage to Santiago da Compostela in the spring of 1221. In his absence, Hubert de Burgh and his other enemies began proceedings against some of his allies. When he returned he faced accusations of withholding revenue collected as Sheriff of Hampshire from the exchequer and was eventually assessed a large fine of £500 in 1927. He then went off on a Crusade and did not return to England until 1231.

Henry III was no longer a minor and was increasingly in charge of affairs and he brought his old mentor back into court as a baron of the exchequer. Hubert de Burgh’s position was now in decline and des Roches was able to run the tables on his old enemy and have him excluded from office in 1234. Unwilling to stop there, des Roches started proceedings against other enemies and in consequence pushed the country into a civil war that lasted almost a year. He overplayed his hand, and although the rebellion was eventually quashed, the cost to the exchequer was huge, and Henry lost confidence ins old advisor.

At the start of April 1234 des Roches was ordered to leave court and to meddle no more in political affairs. His aides were also stripped of office. Des Roches was allowed to retire relatively unscathed, and in the spring of 1235 sought relief from his problems in England by a further series of adventures abroad, joining Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–41) and the emperor Frederick II in a campaign against the Roman commune. His relations with the emperor were soured by letters, sent by King Henry, warning Frederick against des Roches, while the pope is said to have favoured him only out of greed to obtain access to des Roches's vast wealth. In 1236, following representations from the pope, he received licence from Henry III to return to England; he is said to have arrived back about 29 September, broken in health, and one of his first acts was to draw up his will. During the last eighteen months of his life he was appointed to preach a crusade for the rescue of the Latin empire of Constantinople, helped quell disturbances at Oxford against the papal legate Otto, and, ironically, is said to have urged the king to favour his native barons against the newly introduced alien, Simon de Montfort (d. 1265). Des Roches died at his manor of Farnham on 9 June 1238. His heart was buried at nearby Waverley Abbey, his body in Winchester Cathedral, in a tomb still marked by a black marble effigy.

Peter des Roches was a man of huge wealth and his income as bishop of Winchester rose during his tenure from £1500 to £3000 a year. These values seem paltry today but in the 13^th century he was the equivalent of a multimillionaire. He could therefore well afford his legacy of monastic buildings. Winchester cathedral was enlarged  and he founded the monasteries named at the head of this article, including of course. Titchfield. This will be discussed in another post.

Hollam House

Hollam House in the 1920s

Hollam House, overlooking Titchfield on the south side of the river, was built in 1802 for a Royal Navy captain, James Anderson. Although just completed in the 19th century it is characteristic of late 18th century building. Pevsner has almost nothing to say about it, so I don't think he found it in any way remarkable. The origin of the name Hollam House is obscure.

In 1957 it was developed as a care home but sometime later it was remodelled and restored to a spacious mansion. In recent years it gained some notoriety during the MP's expenses scandal because it was owned by Sir Peter Viggers, the MP for Gosport, who commissioned a very expensive duck house for the pond at Hollam House.

The infamous duck house

He subsequently sold the house.

A recent view

St Margaret's Priory

The first thing that can be said about St Margaret's Priory is that it was never a priory. The name was adopted in the 20th century as a fashionable name for an old building.

Parts of the building date from the late 16th century or early 17th century and the dominant feature of the building, the brick tower, dates from this period. The residential part was substantially enlarged in the late 18th century.

The question as to why it was built is a challenging one. Some have suggested that it was built as a lookout tower to spot game in the park, although the practicalities of communicating that information to the hunters is difficult to imagine unless they had developed some kind of semaphore system. More  plausible is the theory that it was built at the time of the Spanish Armada invasion as a lookout point. Certainly there is an unimpeded view for miles.

Once built it may have occurred to the third earl that it could be developed as a residence, possibly for one of his officials, or, as has been suggested, a dower house. It was certainly used for the latter purpose during the period that the Delmé family owned the estate.

From the 1620s onwards the house was occupied by a farmer and it was known as St Margaret's Farm. A document dated 1641 describes it as "a capital messuage (house and associated buildings) and farm called St. Margaret's, wit a parcel of land enclosed from the great waste of Titchfield (Titchfield Common) and two closes (enclosed fields) called Low Lamber and the Outash."

It was occupied by tenant farmers until the Delmé family appropriated the building for their own use, and considerably enlarging it in the process.

It was purchased in 1919 by Herbert Hughes-Stanton, who, being of a romantic disposition, added many "Tudor" features to the building. Hughes-Stanton was a respected artists and Royal Academician and one of his sons, Blair Hughes-Stanton, became even better known as an artist.

In recent times the building has been subdivided into three separate properties.

Titchfield Hundred

The manor and the hundred and the shire were Saxon administrative inventions and were adopted without change by the Normans. The French name of Manor was substituted as was County, but the Hundred  kept its Saxon name.

Broadly speaking the manor was a definable area of land between 1,000 and 3,000 acres which would support a lord and his attendant families. These manors were assessed for taxation purpose in a measure known as a hide - about 120 acres. Each manor had its own court to deal with its own local disputes but where problems overlapped the territory of another manor the Saxons devised the Hundred Court. Manors were grouped together as Hundreds, that is a territory more-or-less equivalent to 100 hides, and these hundred usually took their name from the central meeting place. Titchfield was one such Hundred.

The history of the Hundred of Titchfield is not straightforward. Although, as we can see from the map, the hundred covered a territory, it represented a jurisdiction and from time to time powerful lords and the abbot of Tichfield withdrew from the hundred, such that by the time of Edward I the hundred consisted only of Wickham, Segensworth, Stubbington and Rowner.

At Domesday the hundred was, as represented on the map above, and included Titchfield, Faccombe, Meon, Bromwich, Bentley, Crofton, Funtley, Wickham, Segenworth, Hook, Stubbington, and Rowner. It  was assessed at 46 hides, a low value, which can be explained by the fact that the king, who held Titchfield directly excused himself tax and the very large and prosperous, and indeed populous, manor was only assessed at 2 hides - a tax which does not appear to have been collected anyway.

The Hundred itself was farmed out, that is the rights to the court were granted to  someone willing to pay for the privilege. It yielded 58s. 4d. in 1266 and 30s in the time of Richard II. These were the figures paid to the Treasury, so one assumes that the amount collected from taxpayers was in excess of those figures. This relatively low amount illustrates how the Titchfield Hundred had become fragmented and that the ability to make money from administering justice here was limited.

After the middle ages the Hundred continued to serve their function for the administration of justice and collection of taxes, but their importance declined from the 17th century as newer institutions emerged. In the 19th century the development of Poor Law Unions, sanitary districts and highways districts made them redundant. 19th century government acts which created County Councils and Urban and Rural Districts made them completely obsolete. Curiously the Hundred was never formally abolished by Parliament, so in a notional sense they still exist.

Today their only us is in one of those peculiarly British legal loopholes to allow MPs to give up their seats in Parliament without an election. MPs cannot resign their seats; only an election can unseat them. However, if they hold a royal office they cannot be a member of Parliament. So by applying for  the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds (in this case an unpaid royal perquisite) they are automatically barred from holding a parliamentary seat. Once those formalities are done with the MP resigns from the Chiltern Hundreds. The last person to be Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds was Sadiq Khan, now Mayor of London.

I have no idea who last held the rights to the Titchfield Hundred, nor whether that is discoverable. It's an intriguing question.

in 1788, these areas made up the Titchfield Hundred.

  Titchfield Park (Fareham parish; SU5307)
  Abshot = Abshot (Fareham parish; SU5105)
  Alverstoke = Alverstoke (Gosport parish; SZ6099)
  Brunidge = Brownwich (Fareham parish; SU5103?)
  Chilling = Chilling (Fareham parish; SU5004)
  Crofton = Crofton (Fareham parish; SU5504)
  Fareham = Fareham (Fareham parish; SU575061)
  Gosport = Gosport (Gosport parish; SZ616998)
  Gr. Funtley = Funtley (Fareham parish; SU5608)
  Hellhead = Hill Head (Fareham parish; SU5402)
  Hook = Hook (Fareham parish; SU5005)
  L. Funtley = Funtley (Fareham parish; SU5608)
  Leigh = Lee-on-the-Solent (Gosport parish; SU5600)
  Leigh Marks = Lee Marks? (Gosport parish; SU50?)
  Rowner = Rowner (Gosport parish; SU5801)
  Stubington = Stubbington (Fareham parish; SU5503)
  Titchfield = Titchfield (Fareham parish; SU541058)
  Warsash = Warsash (Fareham parish; SU4906)
  Wickham = Wickham (Wickham parish; SU575114)

Titchfield in 1066

900 years ago this year, England's political structure changed. The new king very quickly replaced all the minor Saxon lords known as thanes and replaced them with more powerful barons and bishops. These men were granted great tracts of land, often scattered across the country, which they could hold from the king as tenants-in-chief. In turn they distributed land to their followers. In many parts of the country the change was noticeable and significant.

Titchfield, however, was probably immune to this change. It was held directly by King Edward before 1066 and assumed by King William after the Conquest, and because it was held by the king, the Domesday Book of 1086 is less helpful than it is with other manors. Usually the entries express a value of the land as it was in 1066 and its present (i.e. 1086) value. Sometimes this went up and sometimes down and more often than not stayed the same. Titchfield was not given a value in either 1066 or 1086. Since it was not subject to any pillaging by the invading army in 1066, it is probable that the villagers placidly went about their work and the value of the land stayed constant.

The size of Titchfield is also difficult to estimate from the Domesday entry. It did become a very large parish, stretching to the Hamble river in the west, to Rowner in the south east and to Wickham in the north east. We cannot be absolutely sure that this was the extent of the parish in 1066, but by eliminating manors held by others we may arrive at some estimate. William's powerful baron, Hugh of Port, held Wickham, Segensworth, Hook and Stubbington. Count Alan held Crofton and Funtley. William Maudit held Rowner. So by eliminating these manors Titchfield in 1066 might not be too far from our present understanding of its domain. That is, it probably extended from Segensworth to the Solent on the west side of the river and included Titchfield Common, Whiteley, Sarisbury and Swanwick.

Another difficulty is being able to read the tax assessment. The Anglo-Saxon system used a unit called the hide. It is not a precise measure as its value would depend on the quality of the land, but scholars reckon that it was about 120 acres in most parts of England. A manor assessed at 10 hides would cover about 1200 acres. For comparison purposes here, Wickham was assessed at 12 hides and Crofton at 7.

Titchfield is only assessed at 2 hides, so by using the above calculation we would be looking at an acreage of about 250. This is clearly wrong because there are other indicators to show that it is quite prosperous. There is land in Titchfield for 15 ploughs, whereas Wickham has land only for 7 ploughs and Crofton 5. Something else is happening, and that is that the good villagers of Titchfield are not being assessed for tax. They are presumably paying their rental to the king but the king is content to waive any further taxes. So the inhabitants of Titchfield were in a favourable position.

There appear to be other indications that this competitive advantage is working for them. There are two mills in Titchfield, each valued at 20s. Wickham has only one mill of the same value and Crofton's mill is valued at 12s 6d. Titchfield also has a market with the toll rights amounting to 40s. (Let me also add that while these amounts appear trivial today, they were huge in 1086.)

16 villagers, 13 smallholders and 4 slaves are recorded at Titcfield in 1086. The villagers probably worked 30 acres each and the smallholders half of this or less. The slaves of course had no rights and possibly worked the king's land. If we assume that each of these individuals counted here represents a family of, say, 4, then including two millers, we might have found a population of 140-150 in Titchfield in those days, and, small as this appears to us today, they formed a larger community than any of the surrounding manors.

A Royal Wedding at Titchfield

Medieval monasteries were amongst the most impressive buildings of their times. They were spacious, sumptuously built and maintained and were certainly fitting places for the accommodation of the well-to-do. The abbey at Titchfield, although by no means the largest or richest, was nevertheless well appointed and an appropriate place for a royal wedding.

The occasion was the marriage of Henry VI, to Margaret of Anjou, and the day was 22 April 1445. Margaret was 15 years old and Henry eight years her senior and this day was the culmination of a good deal of diplomatic effort over a protracted period. It was a highly political marriage with a great deal at stake, for the English at any rate, and it turned into a major political miscalculation by the English.

Activity around the idea of a marriage went back to the beginning of 1444 when the English were trying to construct a truce. French resurgence since the time of Joan of Arc made the English hold on Normandy increasingly tenuous and expensive and some breathing room was required. A marriage for Henry, now in his early 20s seems to be a way of securing this. Charles VII of France was amenable to the idea, but he would not propose his own daughters and attention then fell upon Margaret of Anjou. Her father, Rene, duke of Anjou was a cousin to the Valois king but other than that had little to offer. He had wasted a good part of his life pursuing his phantom title to the kingdom of Naples and bankrupted himself in the process. Therefore Margaret came only with a name and a dowry.

Queen Margaret

However, the English government was interested. The arrangement promised a two year truce with the prospect of negotiating something of longer duration, and in a spirit of optimism Margaret was married at the church of St Martin at Tours on 24 May 1444 to Henry VI. Standing in as proxy for the king was William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Once the diplomatic business of the marriage and the truce was effected, the earl returned to England.

Six months elapsed and Suffolk, newly promoted to marquess, returned to France to escort Margaret to England. He was accompanied by Sir Richard Woodville and his wife Jacquetta. They were to spend some time in France. Margaret was unwell at this time and the winter weather that followed did not allow a crossing so it was not until April of the following year that they were able to cross the Channel.

The party landed at Porchester on 9 April but Margaret was again unwell. It seems to have been something more than sea-sickness as it was described as caused  'of the labour and indisposition of the sea by occasion of which the pocks broke out upon her.' Whatever the complaint, it kept her down for seven days.

The chroniclers are vague about what happened to her. Gregory say that she went to Hampton (Southampton) to rest in God's House, before returning to Titchfield. Gregory says that she went to Southwell (probably meaning Southwick) and Fabyan's Chronicle also records that they were married at Southwick. It may be hard to make sense of all this. Porchester had been converted to a royal palace by Richard II and was perfectly able to accommodate large retinues. It was a practical place to house Margaret's party. There was a connection with the Priory of Southwark since it was at one time within the walls of Porchester Castle until they decamped for their own place a few miles north in the middle of the 12th century and it is possible that Henry himself was staying there. It would make better sense for him to be lodging at Titchfield; otherwise why hold the ceremony there rather than Southwick? Margaret may have been taken to God's house at Southampton because there were men there who could minister to her sickness. She would have been taken by water (by far the fastest way to travel) and returned to Porchester ready to progress to Titchfield.

Initially the marriage was considered a success by the English public since it promised years of peace in the future, but it quickly unravelled. In July a French embassy came to England to discuss a further truce and of course they wanted something in return. The County of Maine, at that time a buffer state between French Anjou and English Normandy, was desired by the French. Both Henry and Margaret, already asserting herself, were party to the negotiations and Henry gave a private undertaking to cede Maine to France in return for a 20 year truce. Suffolk and a few others were involved but the treaty was a secret one and by 22 December Henry agreed in a letter to surrender Maine by 30 April 1446.

Had this resulted in the intended peace the trade may not have been such a bad one but the Maine garrison, who had not been consulted or informed, refused to surrender. Charles chose to consider this a breach of the treaty and marched into Maine in February 1448. Two weeks later it was his. The following year he marched into Normandy and within two months had taken Rouen. Everything was quickly lost and England's presence in France was now reduced to the Pale of Calais.

There is little trace of the abbey today. It was acquired by Sir Thomas Wriothesly, later Baron Titchfield and later still earl of Southampton in 1539 and he immediately set about converting the abbey into a splendid Tudor country house. Of that only the gatehouse and some walls survive.

There is a local legend that Margaret and her retinue crossed the River Meon at the bottom of Fishers Hill and indeed this bridge is often referred to as the"Anjou Bridge" today. This stone bridge dates from 1625 and doubtless there were earlier wooden bridges at this narrow crossing. There is no documentary evidence that I know of to establish this bridge as the crossing, one way or the other, but sometimes local legends are important.

The "Anjou Bridge" with Titchfield Abbey in the background.