William Lewin of Otterden Place

We have already seen that the striking alabaster memorial to William Lewin in Otterden Church was moved into the north aisle when the new church was built, and William Paxton would have seen it every day he when worshipped there. But Lewin’s own family, and that of the Auchers (after whom Aucher Villas’ almshouses in Canterbury are named), from whom he inherited Otterden Place, has its own fascinating story.

The Aucher family had a very long pedigree, and were connected with Otterden Place from at least the 1430s. Many were in government service: Anthony Aucher, Marshal of Calais, died of wounds sustained in the siege of the town in January 1558 when a surprise artillery attack caused the fall of the last English-held territory in France. John Aucher’s daughter Anne married Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1570 and brought him Otterden Place as part of her dowry, and it was Gilbert from whom William Lewin bought the house around 1578, sold to finance Gilbert’s voyages of exploration that ended when his ship , the Squirrel, was wrecked off Newfoundland  in September 1583. 

Otterden Place then still had many of the features, such as the bright red brick courses around the corners of the east and west faces and octagonal chimney stacks, dating from its first Tudor building in the early 1500s, although William remodelled it as a two-winged and two-storey courtyard house. He cannot have spent much time in Kent, however as, after a glittering career at Cambridge University, he became a prominent church and chancery lawyer in the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, sitting in Parliament as the member for Rochester. 

William’s wife Anne  bore him 7 daughters and 4 sons, although the eldest son Thomas seems to have predeceased him; I think one can count only 3 sons at the head of the mourning group kneeling beside the cenotaph that Epiphanius Evesham built for him in 1599, with his achievements as lawyer and statesman written on the stonework. William’s second son Justinian became his heir and Evesham built him an equally striking alabaster and black marble memorial in the church in 1620. William had wished to be buried in Otterden but was in fact interred in St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch in East London in April 1598: plague was rampant in London in the 1590s and it may be that his body could not be moved to the country for fear of infection.

Otterden Place then passed through the Curteis’ and Wheler families, the farm and estate becoming part of the Wheler Foundation trust in 2004. The other Aucher estates in Bishopsbourne and Bourne Park near Canterbury provided enough income for John Aucher to endow in 1701 a home for 6 poor widows in the Cogan Hospital, thus neatly linking Otterden and Canterbury in our Vlieland story.

Thanks to Amicia de Moubray and Faversham Life for the photograph of the 

Lewin tomb in Otterden Church.And to Barbara !!

St Lawrence the Martyr, Otterden: William Paxton’s church

 St Lawrence the Martyr, Otterden: William Paxton’s church

St Lawrence Church, in the ancient parkland of Otterden House on the North Downs, is now a private chapel but was as we know, from 1850 to 1882, William Paxton’s living: the parish church for the village is now St Mary’s Stalisfield, Jerome Nicholas’ church.

The church is dedicated to St Lawrence (or Laurence). St Lawrence was executed in the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Valerian in 258; another Lawrence was sent by Rome to convert the Anglo-Saxons of Kent to Christianity; arriving in Thanet in 597 or 601, he was Archbishop of Canterbury from 604 to 619, the year of his death. 

In a countryside described by Edward Hasted* in 1798 as ‘poor and barren’ with steep flint roads ‘unsafe to travellers’, it was surprising to find a sophisticated classical Georgian church in austere red brick, built in1753–4 on the footings of the original flint thatched 13th-century foundation. The bricks were probably made in the estate for both Otterden House and the church, as transporting bricks imported from Holland and landed on Faversham Quay was impossible over the existing roads.  

The 1750s’ rebuild was financed by the Reverend Granville Wheler, £400 of the cost coming from the will of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Granville’s sister-in-law. The elegance of the ‘Chinese Chippendale’ fretwork benches, painted to look as if they were of grained wood, and the monuments to previous owners of Otterden House, made William’s church a very special space. Sir William Lewin’s seven daughters are lined up in identical ruffs and bonnets under his tomb; his son Justinian lies in full armour, with his widow and daughter kneeling beside him, both moved from the old church into a recess in the north wall of the new one. 

These were almost certainly sculpted by Epiphanius Evesham, a pupil of the Anglo-Dutch master Richard Stephens: Evesham was noted for ‘the gift of grouping’ and also made monuments to the Roper family in Lynsted Church and the Hawkins’ in Boughton-under-Blean (home of Phoebe and George Coulson). They were both recusant (Catholic) families, who trusted Evesham, who passed as an Anglican but had Catholic sympathies, to memorialise their dead in ways that looked Anglican but had secret images within the sculpture that a Catholic would understand.

*Edward Hasted wrote a topographical history of Kent in  12 volumes (1779–99), with such details as being attacked by ‘biting flies’ as he surveyed an apple orchard!

Thanks are due to Faversham Life (favershamlife@gmail.com) for some of the material in this post, taken from their post of 19 April 2019,and to Barbara !