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The Grandisons’ vast possessions included a castle at
Asperton near Hereford, the cathedral of which city houses the magnificent
tomb of Otho’s elder brother, Peter, but their principal seat was at the
Kentish Farnborough, then in the parish of Chelsfield. The Hospitallers,
as owners of the Ash advowson, cannot have been much pleased to welcome
this family as counterparts in matters secular. In the year 1318, there
had been much trouble between them, the Prior of the Hospital complaining
that William de Grandison and his sons Peter and Otho had broken into his
houses at Dartford and committed robbery and assault and William counter
claiming that there had been theft of his goods there.20
The history of the Grandisons’ manor of Ash was thenceforth
long bound up with that of three other manors belonging to the family, Chelsfield,
Old Fawkham and Easthall in Orpington. Otho’s son, Sir |
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Thomas, was the last of his line and the four manors
later passed to Sir Guy de Bryan, a remarkable and long-lived warrior and
diplomatist, who had married a daughter of one of the Grandison co-heiresses.
His son, Sir William do Bryan, who lies buried in the church of St Peter
and St Paul at Seal, died without issue and, after his time, Ash came to
Sir Guy’s widowed granddaughter, Philippa Devereux, later the wife of
Sir Henry le Scrope, and subsequently to her sister, Elizabeth Lovel. Some
years on, the owner was Sir James Boteler, who became Earl of Wiltshire
and Ormond. A staunch Lancastrian, the Earl was captured by the Yorkists
in 1461, at Towton, and taken to Newcastle, where he was executed. His
head was displayed on London Bridge, which was perhaps as near to Ash as
he usually came.
The Earl’s estates being forfeit to the Crown and the Crown
itself having changed hands at Towton, the new |