[[489]]No. 1, Sardinia Street—ground floor (photograph).

Sardinia Place—View looking north from Sardinia Street (1906) (photograph).

Sardinia Place—View looking north from Little Wild Street (1906) (photograph).

XLVI.—SITE OF LENNOX HOUSE.

In 1590 William Short, the same who ten years later bought Rose Field, purchased of John Vavasour two messuages, two gardens and four acres of land, with appurtenances, in St. Giles.[[490]] The precise position of the property is not stated, but from evidence which will be referred to, it is known that it lay to the west of Drury Lane, and comprised The Greyhound inn in Broad Street, with land to the south lying on both sides of what is now Short’s Gardens.

Esmé Stuart, Seigneur D’Aubigny, Duke of
Lennox.

A portion of this property he leased,[[491]] in 1623–4, to Esmé Stuart, Earl of March (afterwards Duke of Lennox), for a term of 51 years as from Michaelmas, 1617. It is possible to ascertain within a little the boundaries of this part of the Short estate. In a deed[[492]] dated 10th January, 1614–5, relating to Elm Field, the land lying between Castle Street and Long Acre, the northern boundary is stated to be “certain closes called by the name of Marshlands alias Marshlins, and a garden sometime in the tenure of William Short or his assignes”; and in a later deed,[[493]] dated 2nd February, 1632–3, relating to a portion of the same field, the northern boundary, said to be 249 feet distant from Long Acre, is referred to as “a way or back lane of 20 feet adjoining the garden wall of the Right Honble. the Duchess of Lenox.”

The distance of the “back lane” from Long Acre corresponds exactly with that of the present Castle Street, and it is therefore clear that this was the southern boundary. The property afterwards came into the possession of the Brownlow family, and an examination of the leases which were granted in the early part of the 18th century, shows that it reached as far as Drury Lane on the east and Short’s gardens on the north. On the west it stretched as far as Marshland.[[494]]

Whether the house leased to the Earl of March was one of the two (the other being The Greyhound) purchased by Short in 1590, or a house quite recently built, there is no evidence to show.