A communication formerly ran from a secret chamber in the oak-panelled dining-room of Birtsmorton Court, Worcestershire, to a passage beneath the moat that surrounds the structure, and thence to an exit on the other side of the water. During the Wars of the Roses Sir John Oldcastle is said to have been concealed behind the secret panel; but now the romance is somewhat marred, for modern vandalism has converted the cupboard into a repository for provisions. The same indignity has taken place at that splendid old timber house in Cheshire, Moreton Hall, where a secret room, provided with a sleeping-compartment, situated over the kitchen, has been modernised into a repository for the storing of cheeses. From the hiding-place the moat could formerly be reached, down a narrow shaft in the wall.
Chelvey Court, near Bristol, contained two hiding-places; one, at the top of the house, was formerly entered through a panel, the other (a narrow apartment having a little window, and an iron candle-holder projecting from the wall) through the floor of a cupboard.[1] Both the panel and the trap-door are now done away with, and the tradition of the existence of the secret rooms almost forgotten, though not long since we received a letter from an antiquarian who had seen them thirty years before, and who was actually entertaining the idea of making practical investigations with the aid of a carpenter or mason, to which, as suggested, we were to be a party; the idea, however, was never carried out.
[Footnote 1: See Notes and Queries, September, 1855.]
BIRTSMORTON COURT, WORCESTERSHIRE
PORCH, CHELVEY COURT, SOMERSETSHIRE
Granchester Manor House, Cambridgeshire, until recently possessed three places of concealment. Madingley Hall, in the same neighbourhood, has two, one of them entered from a bedroom on the first floor, has a space in the thickness of the wall high enough for a man to stand upright in it. The manor house of Woodcote, Hants, also possessed two, which were each capable of holding from fifteen to twenty men, but these repositories are now opened out into passages. One was situated behind a stack of chimneys, and contained an inner hiding-place. The "priests' quarters" in connection with the hiding-places are still to be seen.
Harborough Hall, Worcestershire, has two "priests' holes," one in the wall of the dining-room, the other behind a chimney in an upper room.
The old mansion of the Brudenells, in Northamptonshire, Deene Park, has a large secret chamber at the back of the fireplace in the great hall, sufficiently capacious to hold a score of people. Here also a hidden door in the panelling leads towards a subterranean passage running in the direction of the ruinous hall of Kirby, a mile and a half distant. In a like manner a passage extended from the great hall of Warleigh, an Elizabethan house near Plymouth, to an outlet in a cliff some sixty yards away, at whose base the tidal river flows.