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 !!