fittings from the church. It is also recorded that the tiled floors of the church were taken up and sold, however, only 10% of them were worth saving. Despite this selling-off of materials from the former abbey buildings, the bare stones left behind were vital building blocks for the new house, and Wriothesley supplemented this valuable resource with fresh Caen stone. In contrast to the parlous state of the abbey buildings, the commissioners remarked upon the impressive series of four fishponds to the north-west of the property. These measured "a mile in length to ford and harbour" and contained an estimated 100,000 "carpes, tenches, breams and pike." Unlike his similar project at Beaulieu Abbey, which he had also been granted by King Henry, Wriothesley chose to convert the main abbey buildings, including the church, into his house. It was an imaginative scheme, built under the direction of master mason Thomas Bartewe, a prominent contractor for King Henry's contemporary fortification works along the South Coast. He constructed a spectacular castellated gatehouse with four octagonal turrets which was forced through the middle of the nave to provide the appropriate seigneurial emphasis needed for a classic Tudor courtyard house. The cloister became the central courtyard of the house (a magnificent fountain was placed in the middle), the old refectory, with the addition of a grand porch, became the great hall, while the rest of the abbey was turned into fine apartments for the family. The church tower was initially kept as part of the house but it was soon demolished on the advice of John Crayford, one of the king's commissioners who helped to oversee the reconstruction on behalf of Wriothesley. Crayford was anxious to see the tower pulled down as, if it was left standing, the chimneys would have to be raised some twenty feet higher - and at great cost - to avoid defacing the church tower with their smoke. Other features of the mansion included a private indoor theatre and a deer park. The resulting palatial dwelling attracted favourable notice from Wriothesley's contemporaries: in 1540, the traveller and historian John Leland noted in his Intinerary, Place House was considered sufficiently "embatelid" that it was regarded as a castle or fortified house, the building of which officially required a royal licence to fortify, something which Wriothesley neglected to secure. He obtained a pardon for this oversight in 1542. As the home