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The Manor House and Gatehouse
The Mavesyns moved from their manor house at
Blithbury, on the site of the present
Blithbury Bank Farm, to Trentside around
1140 when they founded the Church. According
to Mark Eades (The Old Hall, A Historical
Description and a Guide to the Gatehouse):
‘It is logical to presume that at that
time they built a Manor House adjacent to
the Church on the site of the present Hall.
The nature of the original house is entirely
conjectural. It would certainly have
consisted of a Hall with outbuildings and
was probably enclosed within a moat.
The Manor House appears to
have developed into a quadrangular complex.
The final building of this evolutionary
development was probably the Gatehouse,
which completed the quadrangle by enclosing
the north side of the courtyard. The
Gatehouse is all that remains of the
medieval Manor House.
The Gatehouse is a timber
framed building of two storeys with a
massive Crown Post Roof. The timbers for the
frame were felled in late 1391 or before the
spring of 1392. In 1995 the Nottingham
University tree-ring dating laboratory took
eight core samples from various timbers and
were able to establish this date accurately.
In the Middle Ages oak timbers were worked
unseasoned and therefore the building date
is 1391 or 1392. The first record of the
Gatehouse itself comes in 1407 when Bishop
John Brughill granted Dame Johanna Malvesin
a license to have masses celebrated in the
family oratory, which tradition places in
one of the main chambers of the Gatehouse.’
Mavesyn Ridware was designated a
conservation area in 1974. The documentation
relating to this states that ‘the Gatehouse
is one of the architectural show-pieces of
Staffordshire’. The neighbouring Old Hall on
the site of the Manor House dates from 1718;
the attention to detail and the proportions
give it a far nobler appearance than the
late 18th century description, “a convenient
box”, would suggest. Nearby are the
fishponds as a further reminder of the
Middle Ages.
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