It would appear that the park, now entirely under grass, was once ploughland, for there is at Knole a deed of the time of Richard Sackville, fifth Earl of Dorset—that is to say, the middle of the seventeenth century—which accords to four farmers “the liberty to plough anywhere in the Park except in the plain set out by my Lord and the ground in front of the house, and to take three crops, and it is agreed that one-third of each crop after it is severed from the ground shall be taken and carried away by my Lord for his own use. The third year, the farmers to sow the ground with grass seed if my Lord desires it, and they are to be at the charge of the seed, the tillage, and the harvest.” Later on, in the time of Charles I, hops were grown, not only around the park, but also in it. Women employed in picking the hops were paid 5_d._ a day, but for cleaning and weeding the ground they only received 3_d._ At this time also cattle were fed in the park during the summer, and belonging to the same date (about 1628) are the bills for “Moles caught, 1½_d._ each”; “Mowing the meadows,” at the rate of 1_s._ 6_d._ per acre; “Making hay,” also at 1_s._ 6_d._ per acre; “Carriage of hay from the meadows to Knole barn,” 1_s._ 4_d._ per load; “one hay fork and 2 hay forks together,” 1_s._ 8_d._ For “hunting conies by night and ferret by day” 4_s._ was paid; the expenses involved by the “conies” for one year were exactly £10, which included £5 5_s._, a year’s wages for the “wariner”; but, on the other hand, this was money well expended, for the revenue from “conies sold” covers no less than a fifth part of the year’s total income. The “wariner,” although his £5 5_s._ a year hardly seems excessive, did better than the “wood-looker,” who, for his woodreeveship for a year, was paid only £2.
The accounts of how and when the various outlying portions of the park were taken in can only be of local interest, and I do not therefore propose to go into them. They were mostly bought by John Frederick, the third duke, and by Lord Whitworth, who had married John Frederick’s widow. The ruins round the queer little sham Gothic house called the Bird House—which always frightened me as a child because I thought it looked like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, tucked away in its hollow, with its pointed gables—were built for John Frederick’s grandfather about 1761, by one Captain Robert Smith, who had fought at Minden under Lord George Sackville, of disastrous notoriety, and who lived for some time at Knole, a parasite upon the house; they apparently purport to be the remains of some vast house, in defiance of the fact that no upper storey or roof of proportionate dimensions could ever possibly have rested upon the flimsy structure of flint and rubble which constitute the ruins. They, together with the Bird House, form an amusing group of the whims and vanities of two different ages. But, to go back to the park, I conclude with the following letter, which is among the papers at Knole: