No 4 Incorporating The Judge'S Kitchen

No. 4, incorporating the Judge's Kitchen

Probable merchant's house, built in the 16th century or early 17th century and remodelled in the early 18th century, located on the north-west side of High Street in Launceston.

The building is constructed with render on a timber frame to the front, with moulded wooden cornices to shallow jetties. The rear and right-hand wing have render on rubble at ground-floor level, with slate-hanging on studwork above. The roof is steep rag slate with two gabled dormers and deeply coved eaves cornice, with a stone stack on the right side.

The building is arranged on a courtyard plan, with a deep wing projecting at right angles to the rear right and a wing returned parallel to the rear, known as the Judge's Kitchen. The front elevation is three storeys tall with a four-window range fitted with late 19th-century two-pane horned sashes within wooden architraves. The ground floor contains a house doorway with a panelled door on the left and a large late 20th-century shop front on the right. The rear has an 18th-century stair window with thick glazing bars.

The left-hand elevation of the rear wing features a carved lead gutter dated 1707. There is an original three-light granite mullioned window with one original leaded light, with one mullion removed, breaking the eaves at the far right. Two mid-19th-century twelve-pane hornless sashes and a late 19th-century fourteen-pane horned sash appear to the left. At ground floor level is a pentice roof with eight-pane horned sashes in possible original openings arranged in pairs of lights with rendered mullions between them, and an original four-centred arched chamfered doorway on the right. The other elevation includes at least one 18th-century window with thick glazing bars.

The wing known as the Judge's Kitchen, returned parallel and enclosing the rear yard, has a similar original doorway on its right, with a four-pane horned sash breaking the eaves above. A projecting gable resembling a pediment appears on the left, over a blind first floor and a blocked window to the ground floor.

The interior retains 16th-century floor and roof structures to the front range, with both trenched and butt purlins. Some original floor and roof structure, with feet of trusses only visible, survives in the rear wing. The interior of the Judge's Kitchen is largely inaccessible, though a ground-floor passage was later cut through from inside its original doorway (with internal oak lintels) to the right-hand wing, suggesting these two wings may not have originally had internal communication.

Surviving original features include two moulded oak doorways to the second floor between the front and adjoining wing, one with cup and cover stops and the other with armour stops, both retaining original nine-panel studded doors. Some panelling to the first-floor landing area and ovolo-moulded doorframes are present. A later 17th-century scratch-moulded door (repaired in the 19th century) connects between front attics.

Eighteenth-century features include an open-well closed-string staircase with a pulvinated frieze and fairly heavy turned balusters, moulded handrail, newel caps and pendants. Ovolo-moulded panelling lines the wide passage beside the shop, including a round-arched niche and fireplace frame. A communicating doorway between landing and rear room of the wing and several two-panel doors date to this period, as does a bolection-moulded chimneypiece to the second floor right.

Mid-19th-century remodelling of the rear right-hand wing includes a curved open-well stair, a quadrant-on-plan door, and an iron grate.

The building is reputed to have been the former house of "The Hanging Judge", Judge Jefferies. It is a remarkable and, for Cornwall, remarkably complete large probable merchant's house built around three sides of a courtyard at the rear, adjoining the former castle ditch.