THE CAREW FAMILY OF BEDDINGTON: ACCOUNT BOOK FOR REPAIR OF BEDDINGTON HOUSE

The accounts were submitted to the guardians of Nicholas Carew, by the Earl of Warwick who leased the house from 1649 to 1653. They relate the Earl's expenditure, mainly on repairs and building work on the house and its outbuildings, and also on taxes and assessments, and were prepared as a claim for deduction against the rent. The amount claimed was more than the four years' rent The guardians, however, did not accept liability for all the items.

The first seven pages contain accounts for work carried out in 1650. Page 8 lists taxes and assessments, 1649 to Lady Day 1651. Page 9 is a summary of these seven pages, to which are added a sum total for repairs in 1649. Page 11 is an account of expenditure 'for his Lordshipps Conveniency which he demands nothing from his landlord'. Pages 12-13 bring forward the total from page 9 and continue the account to 1652/3. Page 14 contains the final calculations and the examination of the account signed by Warwick, with additional accounts signed by Warwick and Edward Thurland. There are a number of annotations and calculations as to the accounts allowed by the guardians: page 13 is particularly heavily annotated.

DF239/1 DGS/EAS/PC June 1978 Revised 1998

<span class="wrapper"><p>For other records of the Carew family see 281/-, 643/-, 663/- and 2163.</p> <p>For copies of Carew papers held by the London Borough of Sutton see Z/85/-.</p></span>

There are no access restrictions.

Purchased at Sotheby's, with the assistance of the Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries, on 28 June 1977; this account book constituted lot 4958 in the sale of items from Sir Thomas Phillipps' collections.

This book, in common with many of the records of the Carew family of Beddington, was acquired, after the dissolution of the family estates in 1857, by the bibliophile and collector of manuscripts Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872).

Beddington Park was probably built by Sir Nicholas Carew in the 1530s. By 1658, when Evelyn visited it, it was 'a fine old hall but a scambling house', and its grounds were overgrown.

Beddington was particularly famous for its orangery. The original oranges, grown by Sir Francis Carew (died 1611), were, according to Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London, vol 1, Surrey (London, 1792), planted in the open and preserved in winter by a moveable shed or covering. Lysons repeated Aubrey's statement that the orange trees were brought from Italy, but also mentioned a family tradition that the trees were grown from seed brought to England by Sir Walter Raleigh, who had married Sir Francis' niece. Alicia Amherst in her History of Gardening in England, 1896, and Miles Hadfield, in his History of British Gardening, 1969, suggest, by inference from a letter written by Lord Burleigh in 1562, that Carew might have purchased his orange trees in Paris.

Despite the neglect of the gardens, the orangery was still, according to Hadfield, the most famous one in England in 1691. Indeed, J F Prosser, in his Select Illustrations of the County of Surrey, 1828, stated that in 1690, the trees were thirteen feet high, and produced ten thousand oranges a year. Several authorities, including Manning and Bray, History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (1804-1814), J F Prosser, D Lysons and Thomas Bentham, A History of Beddington (John Murray, 1923), mention the serious damage to the trees caused by frost in the severe winter of 1739.

The orangery building, of which part survives to the present day, dates from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.