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The Prebend House

47 St Margaret’s Street, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

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47 St Margaret’s Street was at some time a row of three separate houses that look as if they were built in the early part of the 18th century. However, it seems to have originally been one property and the façade was added to a late medieval hall house. The three parts relate to the three ground floor rooms of the late 15th century: the hall, originally open to the roof, in the centre, with a service wing (or buttery) on the right and parlour on the left. The entrance opened into a cross passage between the hall and the buttery, later leading to a stair turret that was added at the rear in the 16th century. The hall was floored over to make a chamber on the top floor and a wing was added at the back of the right side and oddly overlapping no. 48, the house next door, which was a part of the same property. The canted bay on the ground floor on the right of the façade is Victorian.

The house was probably built by the Abbey of Shaftesbury for the official (bailiff or steward) who was in charge of the property of the Abbess in her rôle as the Rector of Bradford, providing for the church and the chapels of the large parish of Bradford. After the abbey was dissolved this Rectorial Manor was given in 1543 by King Henry VIII to the Dean and Chapter of the newly-established Bristol Cathedral. It formed the Prebend of Bradford -the source of income to support one of the Canons of the Cathedral. The estate amounted to around 530 acres, of which more than half was in the Tithing of Winsley, including Haugh and Parsonage Farms. The property of the Bradford house itself, with adjoining garden and orchard or pasture, comprised just over three acres. Bristol Cathedral leased it to a series of people, who most of the time sub-let it to tenants (and sometimes the tenants themselves sub-let to others). The Dean and Chapter of Bristol’s Bradford property was handed over to the Church Commissioners who sold it all in 1861.

 Various parts of the Prebend House property were sold off, including No. 48 and the land on which now stand the Health Centre, Swimming Baths, Fire and Police Stations and the new houses on the site of Stone’s Garage. The railway crosses some of it. In the 20th century, the house became a doctor’s surgery, firstly of Dr John Adye, from a dynasty of Bradford medics and then of Dr Janet Burnett until 1961. The name Prebend House is quite recent.