Listing Text

TR 24 SE HOUGHAM ABBEY ROAD
(south side)
4/66
St. Radegund's
27.8.52 Abbey Farmhouse
and Outhouse
GV II*
Monastic refectory, now house. Early C13, converted to house c.1590
for Simon Edolph, and altered C18.Restored 1981. pressed stone, flint and
rubble, with some red brick details, and plain tiled roof. Two storeys on
undercroft, with hipped roof, and brick stacks to rear centre and rear
left. Projecting hipped 2 storey porch to right. Patterned stonework
throughout (of c.1590) with triangular panels, lozenge-shaped ashlar
set in flint panels, and alternating stone and flint blocks. Two cross
windows on first floor, and wooden 4 light mullioned and transomed
window to left, and stone 3 light to centre right on ground floor, both
insertions into earlier openings with label hoods over. Blocked brick
basement opening to left, and 2 wooden casements to centre and to right.
Porch at end right, with leaded wooden casements on first floor, and
moulded round headed arch with imposts and keystone, and spandrels with
shields, and pilaster and cornice surround; at head of flights of 8
steps, with multi-panelled and moulded original door, in keyed and impost
inner doorway. Right-return: tile hung. Rear elevation with greater
evidence of medieval openings, including chamfered doorway, and 3 massive
buttresses. Refectory pulpit remains embedded at first floor level; to
rear right (south-east of house) a single storeyed wing, with corrugated
iron roof, of flint on dressed stone, with boarded door and wooden
casement to east front, being the remains of monastic "common house".
Interior: screens passage, C13 4 bay vaulted undercroft. The Abbey was
founded 1191 for Premonstratensian Canons, colonised directly from
Premontre; major building took place only in the early C13, however, the
foundation declining by about 1450, dissolved 1538, and purchased by Simon
Edolph 1590. (See Sir William St. John Hope, Arch. Cant. 14,1882; see
also B.O.E. Kent II 1983, 439-440; see also I.W. Green, Kent Life, June
1970).

Listing NGR: TR2764342124