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 