Hinchingbrooke House

About

Hinchingbrooke House is an English stately home in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, now part of Hinchingbrooke School. The house was built around an 11th-century Benedictine nunnery. After the Reformation it passed into the hands of the Cromwell family, and subsequently became the home of the Earls of Sandwich, including John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, reputedly the "inventor" of the modern sandwich.

In 1962 it was sold by the 10th Earl of Sandwich, per a son, the 11th Earl of Sandwich, who was born and raised at Hinchingbrooke House. On 8 March 1538, Richard Williams (alias Cromwell), a nephew of Thomas Cromwell, had the grant of the nunnery of Hinchingbrooke, in Huntingdonshire, for the undervalued price of £19.9s.2d. while he was an official Visitor overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries.

A fireplace discovered in the building has his initials. His son, Henry Williams (alias Cromwell), grandfather of Oliver Cromwell, carried out more extensive works on the house. According to Mark Noble, an eighteenth-century writer and frequent visitor at Hinchingbrooke, "The nuns' apartments, or cells, at Hinchinbrook, are now entire, and are used as lodging-rooms for the menial servants...