Historical Background by Martin J. Dearne
The name Cullings (variant Cullynges) presumably derives from Walter Cullings who held a fourth part of a knight’s fee in Cheshunt of the Earl of Richmond in 1303 (page 1912, 441ff, and fn. 135 citing Feud Aids, ii, 453). By 1383 the name is applied to a tenement in Cheshunt held by William atte More which, along with another called Mores, was valued for debt (op cit, and fn. 136 citing Chan. Inq. p.m. 7 Ric. II, no. 147). The debt might have been the same one, in the sum of 101l owed to William de Tongge who thus gained possession in 1385 of the manor of ‘Tongs’ (or ‘Tongges’) (Lysons 1796, 29ff and fn. 1 citing Esch. 8 Rich. II No. 109), but Lysons seems just to have assumed that Cullings and Mores became Tongs and this is at the very least open to challenge (of Page op cit under Tongs). Cullynges is called a manor by this date according to Lysons (op cit), but again presumably assuming that Cullings is part of Tongs, while Page first notes it thus, and held of the manor of Cheshunt, in 1387 when on the 6th October Baldwin de Radyngton, kt., and others received crown licence for the alienation in mortmain of the manor of Cullings to the Abbot and convent of WaItham Holy Cross (page op cit and fn. 137 citing Cal. Pat. 1385 – 9, p. 356; Page and Round 1907, 166ff and fn. 36). Thus, if Lysons was right to assume that Cullings became part of Tongs, it was only for two years and this further weakens the case for any such assumption.
Lysons (op cit), even if he was right to assume that Cullings briefly comprised part of Tongs, certainly erroneously then assumed that Cullings continued to be a part thereof and so that Cullings (aka Tongs or Tongges) became part of the manor of Theobalds (aka Thebaudes or Tibbolds) in the fourteenth century. Page (1912, 441ft) finds no evidence for Cullings being linked to Tongs before they eventually became parts of Theobalds much later (Cullings in 1573; below), and in fact almost no evidence for a manor of Tongs at all beyond the 1385 acquisition. Theobalds itself is first mentioned in 1441 when it is granted by Henry VI, with diverse privileges and exemptions later added, to John Carpenter, clerk and master of St. Anthony’s Hospital, London, John Somerset, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and John Carpenter, the younger (Lysons 1796,29 – 39, fn. 3 and 4; Page 1912, 144ff for the detail ofthis and its later history including its acquisition by Sir William Cecil in 1564).
The erroneous assumption by Lysons appears to have been perpetuated in at least some modem works including Summerson (1959, 107) (who wrongly places the ?existing moated manor house at Theobalds bought by Cecil and shown in Hatfield MSS vol. 143,24 at the Cullings site (though he does not name it» and Croxson (2008,8).
In fact Waltham Abbey continued to hold Cullings to the Dissolution, with (by 1428) the fourth part of the knight’s fee formerly held by Walter Culling (page 1912, 144ff, fn. 138 citing Feud Aids, ii , 450) . On the Dissolution of the Abbey in 1540 it was granted, on the 6th May, for life with other estates by Henry VIII to Robert Fuller, the former Abbot of Waltham (Gairdner and Brodie 1898, 696 ff, 1500, Court of Augmentations Book 235f 17; Page 1912, 441ff and fn. 139) probably as part of a £200 a year pension (Webb 1921, 253ff). Three years later, however, Fuller having died in late summer 1540 (op cit), and Cullings by now being in the tenure of Adam Tanner, John Samond and George Jackson, it was granted by Henry VIII to Thomas Blanke and others , along with several other properties, in respect of a loan to the king of 1.3931. 6s. 8d., but the grant to be void if the loan was repaid within a year (Gairdner and Brodie 1905, 61 ff, 166, 43; Page 1912, 144ff and fn.140 – 1). By 1552, in the reign of Edward VI, Cullings was held by Henry and Alice Beecher, from whom in that year it passed by a fine to Edward Baeshe (page 1912, 144ff and fn. 142). The preamble to the 1562 Cheshunt Field-Book (Cheshunt Library 1562S f 12) notes at this date that two of the manor’s fields (both also called Cullings) held by Baeshe (or Basshe) were common arable, but in which the tenure had been consolidated, leaving claims of common rights acknowledged only by custom (of Glennie 1979, 19). Baeshe conveyed Cullings in 1573 to Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley (page 1911, 144ff and fn. 143) at which point it became part of his Theobalds estate.
Whether any manorial centre at Cullings ever served as a residence for Sir William Cecil is unlikely for, even if one existed, it cannot have been the house of his that Elizabeth I visited initially in July 1564 as some have suggested (e.g. Nicholas Pearson Associates Ltd . 2008, 15) since he would not acquire the manor for another nine years and Elizabeth is likely to have stayed at some predecessor of the palace later developed in the adjacent manor of Theobalds which he had just acquired. Moreover, by the time that Cecil acquired Cullings he had already developed this palace at Theobalds.
Cullings remained part of the Theobalds estate and so in the hands of Cecil, then his son Sir Robert Cecil and, from 1607, King James I and VI, until at least the interregnum, and is frequently mentioned in documentary sources such as the papers of the Cecils (e.g. Glennie 1979, passim) so that it clearly retained at least a titular identity within the estate, which was seized by Parliament during the protectorate. But no documentary mention of the moated site has been traced before the commonwealth.
Whether Glennie (1979, 35) is right to link the moated site to “Two meane decayed houses … in the piece of moated ground” mentioned in a Parliamentary valuation survey of the Theobalds estate of 1650 (PRO E 317 Herts 27 f 7) is uncertain, but, even if he is, the structures might well have been derelict ornamental constructions rather than habitations.
In fact a direct connection between Cullings ‘Manor’, in the sense of an occupation site, and the present moated site was not apparently made in print until the eighteenth century when Lysons, citing information from J. Russell, wrote: “The site of this Manor (Cullynges) was a small moated house, the traces of which are still visible in Sir George Prescott’s park.” (Lysons 1796, 29 – 39, and fn. 11; Sir George William Prescott Bart. was the son of George Prescott Esq. who built the present Theobalds House shortly after acquiring the Theobalds estate in 1762). Whether the traces consisted of building ruins is unknown and, not for the last time, an assumption may well just have been made that the site was that of a manor house based on the presence of the moat. However, cartographic evidence does allow of the possibility that a structure existed within the moat by this time.
COMING SOON… Cartographic regression and aerial photographic evidence
