Collection: The Priest House

Collection-level records:

• Collection overview (Wikipedia)

  It is now a museum of local life with country furniture, ironwork and local history with temporary exhibitions. The cottage garden features large herbaceous borders containing over 170 herbs and perennials and is open to the public from March to October. The garden has been opened twice per annum for the National Gardens Scheme for the past twenty-two years.

  Suffragette Handkerchief

  On the first floor The Suffragette Handkerchief is on display. There are sixty-six embroidered signatures and two sets of initials, mostly of women imprisoned in HMP Holloway for their part in the Women’s Social and Political Union Suffragette window smashing demonstrations of March 1912. The handkerchief was found at a local jumble sale by Dora Arnold, custodian in the 1960s. Its link to the village of West Hoathly is not clear (although John Godwin King’s daughter Ursula was a member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) and research is ongoing. The list of the signatories and some notes on their activism is available.

  Witch marks

  There are witch marks scratched into wood in several places in the house including the front door and on the beam above the main fireplace. These are more properly known as apotropaic marks and were believed to prevent witches from entering the house. They are believed to date from the seventeenth century. Set into the ground outside the front door is a rough slab of iron which is waste from a local furnace. This was believed to prevent witches entering the house (witches were commonly believed to be scared of iron).

  This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “The Priest House, West Hoathly”, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  Source: Wikipedia

  Date: 2025

  Licence: CC-BY-SA