The King's Surveyor

The finding, in brief

Most ancestors from the early 1500s are a line on a pedigree — a baptism, a marriage, a burial. James Nedeham is not. Born in London about 1490, the son of a city carpenter, he rose across twenty-five years of the trade to become Surveyor of the King's Works — the man who ran every building project owned by Henry VIII, from Hampton Court to the Tower of London. In 1538 the king granted him a dissolved priory at Little Wymondley in Hertfordshire, and that house became the seat of the family for the next two hundred years. Barbara Tempest Needham — the woman who, in 1713, sailed for Charleston to marry Christopher de Graffenried, and from whom the American line begins — was his direct descendant, baptized at Wymondley in 1685. The whole of the family's English story is anchored in him, and almost none of it has to be inferred: eleven volumes of his own working pay-books survive.

A carpenter's son

James Nedeham's grandfather was a Derbyshire gentleman — modest, but entitled to bear arms. His father, Christopher Nedeham, went south to London and worked as a carpenter, and James was born a citizen's son in the city. He learned the trade, joined the Worshipful Company of Carpenters in 1514, and made his way up through it: a military carpenter at Calais from 1522 to 1525, a gunner and then senior gunner at the Tower of London, and by the later 1520s a craftsman working for Cardinal Wolsey at York Place. When Wolsey fell in 1529 the Crown kept James on to turn York Place into the palace of Whitehall. He was made Master Carpenter of the King's Works in March 1531. On 11 June 1532 he gave a sealed bond of £200 to Thomas Cromwell — then Master of the King's Jewels — and four months later, on 1 October 1532, he was appointed Surveyor of the King's Works.

In charge of the king's houses

The office James held was, in the words of a later county history, that of "accountant, surveyor-general and clerk of the king's works" — the financial, architectural, and administrative head of the whole royal building program. In the 1530s that program ran across some two dozen residences: Hampton Court, Whitehall, Greenwich, Windsor, the Tower, Richmond, St James's, Dover, and more. The great Hall at Hampton Court was completed under his surveyorship in 1535, and its hammer-beam roof — better than a hundred feet of timber over the room — is still holding up the ceiling today. His pay-books catch the work in extraordinary close-up: one volume records payments for the works at Westminster Hall in the spring of 1533 made ready, in the clerk's own words, "ageynst the coronacion of the Quene" — Anne Boleyn.

The priory at Wymondley

On 12 April 1538, by letters patent under the Great Seal, Henry VIII granted James the former Augustinian priory at Little Wymondley, about thirty miles north of London. The house had been dissolved the year before and its canons were gone; James was to hold it of the king in chief, by the service of a tenth part of a knight's fee. He, his wife Alice, and their children moved in. He converted the nave of the old priory church into the family hall, and in 1541 he had his carpenters raise a great tithe barn — a hundred feet long — that is still standing, and still in use, on Priory Lane today. When the heralds recorded the family's pedigree, they set him down plainly: "James Needham of Wymondley Priory, co. Hertf.", married to Alice of Hatfield.

He was a carpenter's son who became one of the most powerful administrators in Henry VIII's England — and the house he was granted for it stayed in the family through eight monarchs and a republic.

The part the record does not soften

James was not only a beneficiary of the English Reformation; he was one of its instruments. In the last years of his life his office ran the demolition of Barking Abbey in Essex, from 1541 to 1542, casting down the abbey church for its stone to rebuild the king's manor at Dartford — the work recorded, undramatically, in his own ledgers. He oversaw the recycling of lead stripped from dissolved monasteries and laid back onto royal palace roofs across the Home Counties. He gained materially from the upheaval of the 1530s, and he also did some of its physical work. It was within his office and within the law as Parliament had framed it, and he was far from alone in doing it — but the record keeps it, and so does this page.

The line he founded

From James the family's English descent runs, generation by documented generation, down to the woman who carried the line across an ocean:

Every generation in that chain is attested in the 1572 and 1634 Heralds' Visitations of Hertfordshire — official inspections carried out under royal authority, the 1572 entry signed by the head of the family in his own hand. The priory stayed in Needham hands for roughly two hundred years, through the reigns of Mary, Elizabeth, James I, Charles I, the Commonwealth, Charles II, James II, and William and Mary, until it passed out of the family in the 1730s. Barbara Tempest Needham was baptized at Wymondley in 1685, into the family that still held James's priory, and belonged to that corner of Hertfordshire before she ever saw the sea.

Why so much of him survives

The reason James Nedeham can be written at this range is that his working papers were kept. Of the twelve annual pay-books his office produced, most survive — the largest run, eleven volumes, in the Rawlinson manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, with more at the National Archives and at Nottingham. They record his clerks and workmen, the wages paid, the materials bought, and the buildings made, day by day from 1532 to 1544. And they carry one further, rarer thing: a descendant of James's, George Nedham of Wymondley Priory, used the fly-leaves of his ancestor's royal ledgers as scrap for his own Hertfordshire household accounts in 1655 and 1668. The same paper holds both hands, a century apart — the King's Surveyor's office-book and a great-grandson's farm sums. James died at Boulogne, on the French coast, on 22 September 1544, about fifty-four years old, and was buried there in the church of Our Lady.

This story is drawn from the family's documented research and opens the narrative in I Am Coming, Volume I.