Bayham Abbey was amongst the twenty-nine houses chosen by Cardinal Wolsey for dissolution in 1526, to fund his new schools and colleges in Ipswich and Oxford.
In 1529 following Wolsey’s attainder the manor of Brockley was seized by the Crown. Dews1 records that the estate ‘was granted by Queen Elizabeth by letters patent in the 10th year of her reign [1568] – May 4th – by the description of the site and capital messuage of the Manor of Brockill, to Philip Conway, but in 1608 it had again reverted to the Crown‘. The land stayed in Crown hands until the time of the Restoration, when the Manor Farm (then known as Upper Brockley Farm) was vested in Sir John Cutler, who settled it, by deed in 1692, on Edmund Boulter, who by will in 1707 left it to his brother William Boulter. In 1709 William Boulter made a settlement by which it passed to his grandson, Richard Wilkinson, and afterwards to William Wickham, and Mary, his wife, sister to the said Richard Wilkinson. In the later 18th C it was in the hands of John and Thomas Drake, the husbands of Wickham’s daughter and granddaughter.
The settlement of Brockley was a small hamlet amidst farmland until the mid-nineteenth century when the area was taken over for housing as London expanded. The area around Manor Farm was reputed to be the site of Brockley abbey and medieval building remains, possibly belonging to the abbey refectory, were located there in the mid-nineteenth century.
St Peter’s. church in Brockley, was built from 1866-1870. It is thought to be built on part of the site of the Premonstratensian Abbey. A well found during construction has been assumed to be monastic.
REFS:
- Dews, N, 1884, A History of Deptford. London. pp 55-56.