Exhibition: The History of Walton Hall

Early owners of Walton Hall c.1200-1622

The first reference to Walton appears in 1201 when Hugh Rixbaud and his wife Juliana obtained a writ of summons against Roger de Bray and his wife Margaret for “lands in Walton and elsewhere”. The Rixbauds are the earliest known occupants of Walton Hall, while the de Brays owned the nearby Walton Manor (situated in Walton and now owned by Intervet UK Production Ltd).

 

By 1231 Hugh Rixbaud had been succeeded as Lord of the Manor of Walton Hall by William Rixbaud, who was then succeeded by another Hugh Rixbaud. Hugh’s daughter Margery married twice. Her second husband was Roger de Brailsford, and their names appear together in documents pertaining to Walton in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. By 1324 Walton had passed to John Brailsford and sometime during the next twenty years it transferred to Nicholas Hunte of Fenny Stratford. In 1348 ‘Advowson’ (i.e. the right to recommend a member of the Anglican clergy for appointment) was made in the names Nicholas Hunte, his wife Agnes and son William. It seems Walton Hall passed to William and then to his brother John Hunte. John’s daughter Joan married John Longueville of Wolverton in 1377 and so the Hall passed to the Longueville family of Wolverton.

 

The image of a Medieval limestone face carving known as a head stop is shown on this page. It is located on the south side of the nave of St Michael's Church, the parish church of Walton, and dates from c.1340, around the time that Nicholas Hunte owned the estate and was authorised with recommending the clergyman for the parish. 

 

During the fifteenth century it was the Longueville family who oversaw the enclosure of land at Walton which caused a decline in the surrounding village. They took possession of around thirty acres and demolished four houses on the estate. No formal record of the enclosure exists but the Lay Subsidy Returns of 1524 reveal that there were twenty heads of household in Walton and by the time of the Bishops’ Census in 1563 only fourteen families remained in the area.

 

The Longueville family remained as owners of Walton Hall for most of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries “…despite two centuries of domestic wrangling during which the rightful heir was dispossessed and the estate settled eventually on the eldest of a crowd of illegitimate children.” (ref: 'Open House' 89, Sep 1973). One of the last members of the Longueville family to own Walton Hall was Sir Henry Longueville (1547-1618) who became High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1592 and again in 1606.

 

In the article in 'Open House' 89 titled “A History of Walton”, author Rosie Seymour wrote: “Walton remained as crown land until the close of the reign of Elizabeth I when the rising cost of administration and rampant inflation forced the sale of much crown property. In those days the monarch was expected to meet the costs of all normal governmental expenditure out of the royal revenues, which consisted of Crown lands and customs duties; taxation was an emergency reserved for time of war! So once again Walton came under the hammer.”

 

Sir Henry Longueville’s eldest son, also called Henry, died in 1621, only three years after his father’s death in 1618. In 1622, the Longueville family finally relinquished their ownership of Walton Hall after more than two centuries and sold it to brothers John and Bartholomew Beale.

 

Medieval finds at Walton

During the 1970s St Michael's Church underwent major restoration and several artefacts from the Medieval and post-Medieval period were unearthed. The token shown on this page is known as a 'Nuremberg jetton' and is dated 1589 when Walton was owned by the Longuevilles. Jettons played a major role in commerce at this time and many were minted. This one bears the name of Hans Krauwinckel II who was a member of a family of jetton makers from Germany working between 1586 and 1636. He created a series of jettons depicting figures from Classical Mythology. The figures of Pallas, Juno and Venus are depicted on the reverse. The hole punched through the jetton may indicate that it was repurposed as a badge or worn on a chain. Alternatively it may have been made to hang jettons together during transport or to distinguish them from coinage. 

 

The glazed patterned floor tiles shown on this page once decorated the floor of St Michael's Church and have been dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. They would therefore have been laid during the Longueville family's tenure of the estate. The tiles were crafted at the kilns in Little Brickhill which is located close to Walton, to the southeast. The kilns at Little Brickhill were known for supplying bricks, roof and floor tiles for churches in the area during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 

 

According to Dennis C. Mynard of Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society... "The decorated tiles found consisted of three designs known at the kiln site, a variation on a fourth and a previously unrecorded design. Two tiles were stamped with part of an inscription, which reads 'THAME', probably the end of a personal name. One was green-glazed and had been impressed with a stamp, so that the letters stood out in relief, the other had a yellow slip under a clear lead glaze, and the stamp had been dipped into the slip and lightly impressed onto the tile so that the letters were of a red body colour and the background yellow" (Ref: Excavations on Medieval sites in Milton Keynes 1972-1980 by D. C. Mynard. Published by Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society, 1994).