Clophill House

Clophill House started off as two smaller cottages built in Tudor times along with much of the western half of Clophill as the village gradually extended along the high street to meet the Bedford road at the Green. Both cottages were later incorporated into the structure of the house, rather than being demolished, so can clearly be distinguished from the later additions.

Viewed from the front the right hand cottage extended away from the street and now forms the kitchen wing. This was originally the farmhouse that farmed the Millcroft estate consisting of the three large fields than ran along the High Street from Mill Lane as far as the cottages on the corner of Great Lane. The other cottage formed a shop so was L shaped to present a frontage to the street with a parlour at the back. The front of the shop was lost in 1720 when the main part of the house was rebuilt as a grander Georgian mansion, however the ground plan of the front two rooms and the panelled sitting room at the back preserves its form.

In actual fact more of the shop may have been preserved within the struture than is at first apparent. The rear gable of the house - containing the panelled room and the Green Guest bedroom - is entirely original. The rear profiles of the two cottages can clearly be seen by looking at the back of the house from the top of the garden, in the form of the two rear gables.

We believe that the ground floor of the front of the house also is original and was simply re-fronted in 1720. Evidence for this is based on the low ceiling height in those two rooms, being level with that of the panelled room, while upstairs the ceiling heights are much higher. Further evidence comes from the sheer size of the chimney breast in what is now the dining room. This is now hidden within the wall between the dining room and the cloakroom off the hall but is quite massive and must have been a kitchen at one point. A single ceiling beam connects both ground floor front rooms but sadly is not of high enough quality wood to be dated by dendrochronology, further circumstantial evidence that it dates from an earlier less expensively built property.

The nearest comparison to what the shop would have looked like is seen by looking at the old post office further along the High Street. This property was built around 1700 by Nathaniel Samm who had bought it and a small parcel of land from John Carter who in 1699 had purchased the farm of the Millcroft estate, all the fields with the exception of Clophill House, from Thomas Beaumont who in turn had purchased them from John Compton in 1682. It is clearly shown on the Wrest Park map of 1716 so had been built by then. The style of the shop, with a central door flanked by a single window either side and dormer windows lighting bedrooms on the first floor, as with the rear gable at Clophill House which probably would have been the height of the roof throughout.

Between 1664 and 1667 Ralph Compton joined these two cottages together by building the connecting hall that links them. When we replastered the hall on the ground floor we found that the brickwork at both ends was exterior brickwork, with delicate lines scribed in the pointing between the bricks, while the front and rear walls were quite different and definitely intended as interior walls. This proves that both the rear gable and the kitchen block pre-date the connecting hall and must therefore be part of the original cottages. Further proof comes from an examination of the roof timbers above the upstairs room in the connecting wing where these are cut into the roofs at both ends, again indicating that it was a later addition and that the roof structure also is original.

We get the date of the union of the two cottages from hearth tax records. The hearth tax was a tax on chimneys introduced under Charles II and payable by whoever was living in the property. In the Hearth Tax return of 1664 Ralph Compton pays for two hearths ("for ye farm" - the front and rear chimneys of the farm cottage) with a note adding that in the 1662 return Compton had been "rote too many by mistake" when he had paid for five hearths (the shop would have had three - corresponding to the two front chimneys at either end of the front of the house and the one at the back of the rear gable). This indicates that the cottages were still separate at this time, however from 1667, 1671 and 1673/4 Compton pays for all five hearths suggesting that the cottages had been joined together and were one property. In subsequent documents when the property is sold it is described as "two cottages being near unto each other" but always traded as one and in single occupation.