Mells Manor House, Frome, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

The village of Mells is recorded in the Domesday Book as belonging to the Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury and remained so until the Dissolution and the seizure of the monastery’s lands by Henry VIII in 1539. Visiting on behalf of the King in around 1543, John Leland wrote: 'There is a praty maner place of stone harde at the west ende of the churche. This be likelihood was partely builded by Abbate Selwodde of Glasteinbyri. Sins it served the farmer of thye lordship. Now Mr Horner hath boute the lordship of the King' (quoted in Country Life 1917). Documentary records of the pre-Reformation Horners are sparse and, according to Country Life (1917), 'fact being absent, fiction has had to step in'. This refers to the well- known nursery rhyme which supposedly recounts how a wicked Steward of Glastonbury namedJack Horner 'put in his thumb and pulled out a plum', the fair Manor of Mells, from the Dissolution pie. The erroneous connection with the Horners of Mells is a late Victorian fancy, the Jack Horner character figuring in popular literature in around 1340 and in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Leland’s evidence states clearly that the property was not stolen but bought for a substantial sum. This is confirmed by the original title deed, bearing the King’s seal, which survives in the family’s possession.

Mells Manor was purchased in 1543 by Thomas Horner and he left it to his nephew, Sir John Horner, who married Merial Malte, the heiress of John Malte, tailor to Henry VIII. Sir John was succeeded in 1587 by his son Thomas, and between them they enlarged the Manor into a spacious Elizabethan and Jacobean house. Thomas had married a daughter of Sir John Popham of Littlecote in Wiltshire (see description of this site elsewhere in the Register) and the Horners and Pophams (who also held large estates in Somerset) worked together in the county for the Parliamentary cause. Thomas Horner died in 1612 and his son, Sir John, armed his tenants to fight on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War. According to Symonds, King Charles’ trooper-diarist, on 16 July 1644, 'the King lay at Sir John Horner’s howse at Mells; he is in rebellion and his estate sequestered' (Country Life 1917). Sir John returned to Mells after the King’s defeat at the Battle of Naseby and put the estate in order, dying a timely death a year before the Restoration, thus enabling his descendants to continue in possession. His great-grandson, Thomas, married the heiress of Thomas Strangways of Melbury Park, Dorset (see description of this site elsewhere in the Register), becoming Thomas Strangways Horner, but left only a daughter who carried the Melbury estates to Stephen Fox, Earl of Ilchester. In 1724 T S Horner built Park House, a more fashionable house in the recently enclosed Mells Park (see description of this site elsewhere in the Register), west of the village. T S Horner’s daughter, Elizabeth, inspired Thomas Hardy’s story 'The First Countess of Wessex' in A Group of Noble Dames, in which the Horners appear as the Dornell family and Mells Park as Falls Park (McGarvie 1992). T S Horner died in 1741 and was succeeded by his brother John (died 1746), and by John’s son, Thomas, in 1758, after a period of minority. In around 1770 the north and central sections of the Manor were demolished to provide stone for the stable courtyard at Mells Park House.

The remaining south wing of the Manor was used at various times in the late 18th and 19th centuries as a farmhouse, a dower house and, between 1850 and 1860, as a small and short-lived vocational school. Sir John and Lady Horner returned to the Manor and restored it as their principal residence in 1902. Sir Edwin Lutyens, a frequent visitor to the house, provided designs for the gardens around 1905, a loggia around 1910, and a music room around 1925 at the eastern end of the house. The Manor remains (2002) in private ownership.