Listed Building record MDR10739 - Chantry House, Kings Newton, Melbourne

Chantry House is four bays long and mostly three storeys high, built of stone with some brick and a tiled roof. The barn and outbuildings that belonged to the house are now separately owned. Kings Newton Chantry, first mentioned in 1238 as a chapel of Melbourne Church, is believed to have stood in Chantry Close, some distance north of Chantry House. Chantry House is likely to owe its name to having been part of the Chantry's endowment. The oldest part of the house is the west end, one end of a timber-framed house, built end-on to the street in the late 15th or 16th century. The present kitchen was added at the end of the 17th century, with a chamber above and cellars below, and was probably timber-framed. Very late in the 17th, or early in the eighteenth, century the rest of the house was built, converting what remained of the original house into a hearth-passage house. The staircase dates from the beginning of the 19th century, and a little later the dairy was built and the kitchen wing rewalled in brick. In the middle of the 19th century the whole eastern part of the front wall was rebuilt, the front wall raised, gables built to light a third storey, and the whole reroofed. Further, more minor, alterations followed. (1) It seems that Chantry House was so named by a Victorian owner, Henry Orton, a potter, who took the name from a field on his farm called Chantry Close. There is no reason for thinking that Chantry House had anything to do with a medieval chantry. (2)