Twenty-First Annual Meeting,Ipswich

Abstract

Lodge Farm is a stone first-floor hall house of the early fifteenth century built for Henry V or VI. Documentary sources suggest that it was the residence of the head park keeper, warrener and forester of Kingston Lacy manor.

Refurbishment of the building in 1986–9 was accompanied by a full archaeological and photographic survey. Archaeological excavation, in advance of underpinning, revealed archaeological features below the foundations. Ditches and post-holes contained pottery dating to the Early Iron Age. Two lengths of ditch, separated by a causeway, are interpreted as part of a deer park boundary. The fillings of the deer-park ditches contained building debris of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century-date, probably from an earlier lodge. A dump of fallow deer antlers within the north ditch filling was dated by radiocarbon analysis to A.D. 1325–1415 A.D. at I sigma.

A study of documentary sources shows Lodge Farm to be an important building within the hunting land of the medieval manor of Kingston Lacy which, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, was associated with rabbit farming.