Dogsthorpe Grange (c. 1209-1936)

Avril Lumley Prior

I wonder if any of our readers can remember ‘Dogsthorpe Grange’, which until 1936 stood on a large plot at the corner of Dogsthorpe Road and Elmfield Road. As we will discover, the site of this once-imposing mansion with its lodge, stables and coach-house had enjoyed a chequered history spanning over seven centuries.

During the twelfth century, the monks of Peterborough Abbey sought to cultivate more ploughlands by assarting [clearing] the woodlands and creating country farmsteads called granges along the margins of their territory and on islands in the undrained fens. By 1209, over 20 acres at Dogsthorpe had been deforested for the production of wheat and oats. Some of the land was leased to tenants, including Beringarius de Estfield [Eastfield], Matilda de Shotendon and the picturesquely named William Pudding. The rest of the estate was retained by the monks, who used the profits from their crops to supply alms for the poor. A farmhouse must have been erected at Dogsthorpe before 1317, for a document of this date recorded a grant made to John Love of a smallholding with ‘a messuage [house], outbuildings and three acres of arable land in the hamlet of Dodisthorp’, which John previously had rented from the abbey for four shillings per annum. The monks of Peterborough were to regret this decision twenty-five years later, when John built his own chapel adjacent to the house in an attempt to avoid attending services at and paying tithes [taxes] to the abbey church two miles away. See Medieval Dogsthorpe.

After Peterborough Abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, ‘Dogsthorpe Grange’, then called ‘Gilhams’ or ‘Kilhams’, was purchased by John Lord Russell of Bedford. In 1578, Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, sold the house and surrounding 286 acres to William Fitzwilliam IV, son of William Fitzwilliam III of Milton. Although William of Dogsthorpe, as he became known, leased his other local properties to tenants and rented a London town-house so that he could attend court, his primary residence was the ‘Grange’, which he renovated and extended. It appears that he personally managed his estate, establishing a profitable ‘ranch’, where cattle were fattened to provide meat for his own household and to sell at market. Upon the death of his father in 1599, William Fitzwilliam of Dogsthorpe moved to Milton and switched to sheep-rearing, converting his rich Dogsthorpe cow-pastures into sheep-walks. In 1633, William of Dogsthorpe’s son, also named William, sold the farm for £500. The farmhouse was enlarged and altered beyond recognition by successive owners, including Captain Newdigate Poynts, killed in the Civil War whilst fighting for Charles I, a blacksmith and beer-seller trading under the sign of the ‘Red Lion’ and John Sturton, the Peterborough chemist and mineral-water manufacturer, who died there in 1885. Finally, ‘Dogsthorpe Grange’ was purchased from the Misses Kate and Margaret Craig in 1936 and demolished to make way for a housing development. Its name is perpetuated in Grange Avenue, which together with Mayfield Road, now occupies the site.

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Adele Gardner.