wn as Little Wicken, Wicken Hurst comprised part of a hamlet of four or five houses, the rest of which lay on the opposite side of the brook in Passenham. (fn. 54) There was a brick kiln on the farm during most of the 18th century, in a copse named Brick Kiln Spinney in 1717. This closed down c. 1800 but another works was established at about that date at Old Copse on the Passenham side of the brook, which was in use throughout the 19th century. (fn. 55)
To the south of the 17th-century park keeper's lodge and later mansion, the map of 1717 marks a moated site, which then formed a small freehold outside the Wicken Park estate. (fn. 56) Remains of the moat were still evident in 1838, by which date it belonged to the Mordaunt estate. (fn. 57) Presumably it marks the site of an isolated medieval farmstead, unless it was the keeper's lodge belonging to the medieval park.
Settlement from the 16th to the 19th Centuries.
In 1511 the two manors were purchased by John Spencer of Snitterfield (Warwicks.), whose grandson, Sir John Spencer of Althorp and Wormleighton (Warwicks.), secured the union of Wick Dive and Wick Hamon into one parish in 1587, (fn. 58) from which time the manor was also conveyed as a single estate, generally known as 'Wicken alias Wick Hamon and Wick Dive'. (fn. 59) The Spencers only occasionally resided at Wicken, although in the early 17th century Robert Lord Spencer rebuilt both the capital messuage belonging to the manor of Wick Dive and the lodge in Wicken Park. (fn. 60) Most of the farmhouses and cottages in both villages were also renewed in this period. The redundant church of St. James, Wick Hamon, however, was taken down. (fn. 61)
Wicken changed hands by purchase again in 1716, when it was acquired by a London merchant named Charles Hosier. Whereas during the Spencers' time the parish had formed a small outlying portion of a large estate centred elsewhere, for Hosier it became his principal residence, which he improved through the purchase of the remaining freeholds and the building of a new mansion in the park, in place of the old manor house near the church. (fn. 62) After Hosier died in 1750, Wicken passed to his granddaughter Elizabeth and her husband Thomas Prowse, an amateur architect who, before his death in 1767, began the rebuilding of Wicken church to his own design and in 1765 prepared plans for the enlargement of the mansion. (fn. 63) He also improved the estate by repurchasing in 1753 two farms at Dagnall which had been sold in the Spencers' time, and by inclosing the remaining common fields in 1757, which led to the building of three farmsteads on the new inclosures. (fn. 64)
Wicken passed from Thomas Prowse's widow to their daughter Elizabeth, on whose death in 1810 it once again became part of an estate centred elsewhere and the mansion was let. In 1877, after forty years as a tenant, the 1st Lord Penrhyn purchased the estate, which remained in his family's hands until 1944. (fn. 65) The DouglasPennants' main home was their enormous Caernarvonshire estate centred on Penrhyn Castle, whose chief asset in the 19th century was the extensive slate-quarrying business which dominated the local economy. They appear to have regarded Wicken as a convenient second country estate, only 50 miles from London in excellent hunting country (three generations of the family were masters of the Grafton Hunt), with more congenial neighbours and certainly more amenable tenants than the small farmers and quarrymen of North Wales, amongst whom the family were deeply unpopular. (fn. 66)
There was litle new building in either the 19th century or the first half of the 20th in Wicken, which remained a close community almost entirely owned by a single estate. Sir John Mordaunt provided a schoolroom in 1839, which was replaced by a larger building in 1878, the gift of the 1st Lord Penrhyn, who later met the entire cost of restoring the church. (fn. 67) The 2nd Lord Penrhyn enlarged the mansion in 1913 and provided the village with a piped water supply, but otherwise the Douglas-Pennants did not do much towards mod