Arnold'S Farmhouse

Arnold's Farmhouse, Mountnessing

A house of mixed build dates, mainly 18th and 19th century in its current form, with a substantial earlier medieval core. The building is timber-framed and clad with red brick in Flemish bond and stucco, roofed with handmade red clay tiles and slate. It is set in an L-shaped plan facing roughly south-west.

The entrance range consists of two distinct sections: the left part dates to the early 18th century and the right part to the early 19th century, each with its own rear chimney stack. Behind the left section is a service range of three bays, with an external stack to the left of the middle bay. The rear bay of this service range incorporates a surviving fragment of a late 15th-century house, with the remainder dating mainly to around 1600. Early 19th-century additions include a two-storey lean-to in the rear right angle and a single-storey lean-to to its right, both with slate roofs. To the left of the entrance range stands a 19th-century long single-storey lean-to of red brick, roofed with red clay Roman tiles. The house has two storeys and a cellar.

The entrance elevation is asymmetrical. The ground floor has three 18th-century sash windows of 6+6 lights to the left of the entrance door, and one similar sash to its right. The first floor has three 6+6 sashes at the left and two of the same pattern at the right. The entrance door is early 19th-century, a half-glazed door with two beaded flush panels and marginal lights, set within a simple early 19th-century portico featuring a moulded cornice, mutules and altered square piers. A band runs across the first-floor level, and the roof is of slate with a hipped form. The front elevation is stuccoed, extending about half a metre around each return. The rear right corner of the entrance range is recessed to a quadrant of short radius. The right elevation of the entrance range has early 19th-century sashes of 6+6 lights on both floors, with the ground-floor sash damaged at the time of inspection in July 1989. The right elevation of the service range displays early 19th-century tripartite sashes of 4-12-4 lights on each storey. The left elevation of the service range has on the ground floor one early 19th-century sash of 8+8 lights and one early 19th-century casement of 6+6 lights, and on the first floor one similar sash and two similar casements. The rear elevation of the lean-to attached to the main range has on the first floor one early 19th-century sash of 6+6 lights. The rear elevation of the service range has on the ground floor one early 19th-century casement of 6+6 horizontal panes. Some windows retain handmade glass. The brick cladding is early 19th-century in date, as is the brick construction of the early 19th-century section of the main range. The left-hand lean-to displays one blocked window aperture and two cast-iron roundels.

Interior features are substantial and historically significant. The left ground-floor room of the entrance range retains 18th-century folding shutters in the square reveals of all three windows, and a white marble fireplace with paterae. The right ground-floor room has early 19th-century folding shutters in the wide splays of both windows and an early 19th-century cast-iron fireplace with paterae. The pantry to its rear is fully fitted with attached dressers to front and rear, rare survivals warranting special care. The entrance passage features a semi-elliptical arch and fluted pilasters, with a thick formerly external wall to the left. Pine doors of all periods survive throughout the house, ranging from six-panel moulded doors to plain boarded and battened examples. The cellar door is early 18th-century, with two ovolo-moulded panels. The cellar lies below the left room of the entrance range and has a brick floor with diagonal gully. The floor above is of hardwood, well constructed with plain joists of vertical section jointed to two transverse beams with soffit tenons with diminished haunches, sand-blasted.

The rear bay of the service range is of particular architectural interest, incorporating a low late medieval house on its left side. This fragment displays a chamfered axial beam with step stops and chamfered joists of horizontal section with step stops, jointed with low or central tenons and housed soffits, characteristics typical of the 15th century. The remainder of this bay forms part of a wider and taller range of around 1600. To the right of the medieval fragment is an early 19th-century quarter-turn stair with handrail and stick balusters at the top. The middle bay has a chamfered axial beam and plain joists of square section jointed with soffit tenons with diminished haunches. The front bay floor appears similar but has plastered soffits to the joists. The roof employs clasped purlin construction with four principal rafters of unusual form, reduced at the purlins and expanding to full depth at the apices. Within the main roof of the two rear bays lies what appears to be a secondary roof of poor timber and simple construction, probably serving as a ceiling to improve comfort in the two rooms to the left of the corridor, the corridor itself having a flat ceiling.

This site has manorial origins, recorded from 1493, with a moat located 70 metres to the south-west. The antiquary Morant wrote in 1768: "The mansion house lies about half a mile out of the London road, on the left hand going from Chelmsford. The building is large, and shews great antiquity." The will of John Peert of Arnold's Hall, dated 1583, describes a large establishment comprising 11 rooms in addition to outhouses, with lavishly furnished bedrooms on the upper floor and several musical instruments. The Peert or Pert family continued to occupy Arnold's Hall until 1735 and were evidently people of considerable wealth and status; one served as High Sheriff of Essex under James I, and the last was a Director of the East India Company. It appears that the major house which Morant recorded as still present in 1768 was wholly or mainly demolished in the late 18th century, and the present house represents either a retained part of that structure which subsequently became a smart farmhouse, or alternatively a different house standing approximately 70 metres north-east of the demolished mansion's site, which may have existed contemporaneously as a "home farm".