The Priest House

The Priest House is a house dating from the early 16th century, extended in the 17th century. It stands on the west side of Rotten End in Wethersfield.

The building is timber framed, with weatherboarding and plaster, and is roofed with handmade red clay tiles. It is a continuous jetty house comprising four bays: a central two-storey hall range of two bays with an inserted early 16th-century stack in the right bay against the front wall, a storeyed parlour or solar bay to the left, and a storeyed service bay to the right, of which the end wall returns at an acute angle from the front wall. A 17th-century extension to the left is also of two storeys but lower in height.

The ground floor has seven 20th-century casement windows, the first floor has six 20th-century casement windows, and there is a 20th-century plain boarded door. The jetty has an exposed bressumer carved with a spiral leaf pattern along most of its length, plain at the right end, with exposed beams and joists and three plain brackets. Below the jetty the side of the main stack protrudes through the plaster, with a recess containing three trefoiled heads. The left bay of the jetty is underbuilt. The roof of the original house is hipped at both ends, with original sprockets below the eaves at front, rear, and right end.

The right service bay contains chamfered transverse and axial beams from which the partitions have been removed, plain joists of horizontal section, and a trimmed stair trap that is now blocked. The next bay contains a blocked front doorway with a four-centred arched head, reversed so that the weathered carved front is exposed inside, with pomegranates in each spandrel. A 17th-century plain wood-burning hearth now blocks the original cross-entry.

Behind this is a more elaborate hearth, which protrudes through the front wall. The mantel beam has a cranked upper face and is richly carved with folded leaf, vines, hearts, a bird, a molet, flowers, pomegranates, and the word 'Ihus'. Above the mantel beam is a recessed panel with chamfered jambs and moulded head and sill. The rear of the hearth contains two niches, one with a trefoiled head and one with a plain V-head, and at each side there is a seat recess with a three-centred arched head. Richly carved half-height jowls support a roll-moulded binding beam; the axial beams are similarly moulded. The joists are also roll-moulded, with foliate carved stops, jointed to the beams with soffit tenons with diminished haunches. In the partition at the left end is a doorway to the parlour, with a four-centred arched head. On the upper floor there is a doorway at the front end of the same partition, with a plain straight head and original rebated floorboards.

The scarfs in the wallplates are slightly splayed versions of the edge-halved and bridled type. There are hollow-chamfered arched braces to the tiebeams. The roof is of queen-strut construction with clasped purlins and arched wind-bracing.

The use of the pomegranate motif on the head of the front door dates the building to the period from the marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII and their joint coronation in 1509, to her fall from favour in 1526. The brick hearth is built round a moulded beam in such a way as to suggest that it is not original, and it probably replaces an earlier timber-framed chimney in the same position. Nevertheless, if the pomegranate motif is correctly identified, it was constructed in the same period.

The symbolism of the carving is not entirely clear. The molet probably refers to the De Vere family; none of the flowers are four-leafed, so there is no Tudor rose. The pomegranate dating of the main frame provides a useful check on the typological joint dating used in Essex, confirming the evidence recorded in High Garrett House, Bocking, and Latchley's Manor, Steeple Bumpstead, both with pomegranate decoration, and gives a date range for the unusual type of scarf, also found at Knights Templars Terrace, Kelvedon, and Parsonage Farm, Burwell, Cambridgeshire.

The original purpose of the building is not clear. It is far from a market town and seems too highly ornamented to be a farmhouse. The nearest church is 0.6 kilometres away, in the next parish of Shalford. Some non-parochial ecclesiastical or monastic connection is probable. An added wing, extending forwards from the right end, has been removed in the 20th century.