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The Chantry

Church Street/Barton Orchard, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

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The Barton Orchard side of the Chantry

A chantry -a chapel for praying for the soul of Thomas Horton (who died in 1530)- was set up in Holy Trinity Church and a house was built as the ‘mansion’ for a chantry priest to live in; lands in various parts of Wiltshire and beyond provided an income to pay for the chantry and its priest. Horton’s chantry did not last long, being swept away by King Henry VIII’s religious reforms and dissolved in 1549 and the house was developed into a large house.

The main three-storey façade, facing west, may originally have been E-shaped, with two wings and perhaps a central porch. The wings are of squared coursed rubble stone with mullioned and transomed windows of the late 17th century. A central section of cut ashlar stone that projects forward slightly was added in the 18th century, filling in the courtyard between the two wings. It has a stone doorcase on tuscan columns under a segmental pediment. The central window of the first floor has a round head under a giant keystone.

Little Chantry, on the eastern side, facing Church Street, is a separate house, completely in neo-classical Georgian style. It is faced with ashlar stone, five bays wide and of two floors with a triangular pediment over the central three bays.

The history of the ownership of The Chantry from the middle of the 16th century is very complicated, involving a 2000-year lease that seems to have belonged to the Hungerford family and subsequent sub-leases. Among those who lived here have been Samuel Cam, a clothier with cloth-workshops in the grounds, Sir Benjamin Hobhouse, who inherited it and his son Sir John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton and Samuel Cam’s grandson. Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries it was the home of physician, anthropologist and historian John Beddoe, who retired here from practice in Bristol.