Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Set into the north wall of the nearby churchyard, it was originally the private
entrance to the church from neighbouring Chesterton House (demolished
in 1802), owned by the Peyto family. The gateway, as yet undated, is undoubt-
edly a fine example of ornamental gauged brickwork. The design has been tra-
ditionally accorded to Jones (Lloyd, 1925, 83, 317, 412), but as Wise (2000,
155-6) counters '…most authorities place the date of the Peyto Gateway rather
later in the seventeenth century'.
Wise continues:
The surviving accounts for the House, however, record its construction between
1657 and 1662 and, given that Jones died in 1652 he cannot have been the archi-
tect…. surviving documentary evidence suggests that Chesterton House is the
work of John Stone (1620-67), the son of Nicholas Stone.
John Stone was certainly employed by the Peyto family at this period…in October
1659 Elizabeth Peyto gave £1 to 'Mr Stone for drawing the draught of the head of
the pillars for Chesterton'. In the following year she paid John Stone £2 'for the
2 capitalls of the arch at the staires'….
…but the continuous patronage of the Stones, father and son, by the Peyto fam-
ily over some twenty years strongly supports the identification of John Stone as
the architect in this case.
There are some doubts as to John's practical skills (most likely due to his ori-
ginal education towards a religious life), but he was acknowledged as a good
designer/architect. He employed a regular small staff, including his Dutch
cousins (De Keysers) and several other craftsmen from the Low Countries, as
well as the Danish master sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700).
Payments to John Stone by the Peyto family for his work, as described above,
in 1659 and early 1660 and of Cibber's work there later in 1660, are explained
by Spiers (1919, 28):
…that he [John Stone] went over to Breda [Netherlands] with the intention of
petitioning the King for the grant of the office of Master Mason of Windsor held
by his father; whilst there, however, he had a violent attack of the palsy, which
deprived him of the use of his limbs, and incidentally we also learn from Vertue's
own MSS [Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 23069, f.4.], that Caius Gabriel Cibber, who was
then his foreman, went over to Holland to bring his master home…
Stone was awarded the position for which he had petitioned the King in
August 1660, but later sold it to a competitor, Joshua Marshall, due to continu-
ing ill health. He died in September 1667.
The construction of the Chesterton gateway is now widely believed to be con-
temporary with that of the house. Certainly the quality of craftsmanship is at the
