Brook, Heywood

Latinized to de Caineto, possibly from the French chêne, an oak-tree, was an ancient family, branches of which were scattered throughout southern England, from Kent to Cornwall, and in the Midlands.

The family which inherited Brook was seated at Upottery in Devon from the time of King Henry III (1216–1272).

[13] Sir Edmund Cheyne (born 1401, died 1430),[6] eldest son and heir, of Brook, MP for Wiltshire in 1429.

Alice survived her second husband and married (3rd) Walter Tailboys, of Newton-Kyme, Yorkshire, by whom she had a daughter Eleanor, wife of Thomas Strangeways, of Melbury, Dorset, ancestor to the Earls of Ilchester.

A common image in these windows was the heraldic badge of a rudder, which was noted earlier by John Leland (1503–1552) when he visited Brook.

Sir Ralph Cheney's heraldic badge was a rudder, as is visible sculpted on his monument in Edington Priory church, but had apparently first been adopted by his ancestors the Paveley family of Brook.

Aubrey stated concerning his visit to Brook Hall: "Mr Wadman would persuade me that this rudder belonged to the Paveleys who had this place here".

William Camden stated of Cheney's descendant: "Lord Willoughby, by report Admiral, used the helme of a ship for the seal to his ring".

Following many years with shoring scaffolding for structural support following local authority statutory powers enforcement,[19] following a change of ownership in 2014 the hall was subject to repairs in 2017/18 and was described as a success story for the register.

There was a "canopie chamber", a dining room, parlour and chapel, and the windows were filled with coats shewing the armorial descent of Willoughby, which he described.

Aubrey wrote as follows, describing the coats of arms then visible in the stained glass windows of the Great Hall and the "Canopie Chamber":[28] The Wiltshire historian Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 2nd Baronet (1758–1838) described Brook House in his work "Modern Wiltshire", concerning the hundred of Westbury.

On the right was a high wall and a pile of rough cordwood against it; on the left a buttressed, ecclesiastical-looking building with tiers of windows and three doorways, some four or five centuries old; and before me, at the top of the yard, between the upper end of the high wall and the ecclesiastical-looking building, was the back of the farm-house, its brass pans gleaming.

What is now a cowshed below, a cheese room above, has been the chapel of Brook House, formerly the seat of Paveleys, Joneses, and Cheneys.

The cows made an excellent congregation, free from all the disadvantages of believing or wanting to believe in the immortality of the soul, in the lower half of the old chapel; the upper floor and its shelves of Cheddar cheeses of all sizes could not offend the most jealous deity or his most jealous worshippers.

Evidently both the upper and the lower chambers were formerly subdivided into cells of some kind.The farm-house is presumably the remnant of the old manor house, cool and still, looking out away from the quadrangle over a garden containing a broad, rough-hewn stone disinterred hereby, and a green field corrugated in parallelograms betokening old walls or an encampment.