Brewers Hall

Brewers hall is thought to have been a potential location for and Iron Age hillfort. Earthworks have been recorded on the Brewers Hall peninsula on aerial photographs since the 1950s and it has been argued that the topography in this area is well suited to a hillfort. The name has nothing to do with brewing, the name being an anglicised version of its original 13th century title of Brueres Halgh. An emplacement known as Brewer's Hall Mount was built on this site to hold the largest gun used by the Parliamentary forces besieging Chester during the Civil War. The ancient mansion which once stood on the site was demolished during the siege of Chester and was afterwards replaced by a farmhouse, shown in some detail on the Lavaux Map. It is now the location of the Chester Golf Club.

Brewer's Hall, the estate, which lay west of the city on the river cliff overlooking the Roodee, was held by the Bradford family, serjeants of the Eastgate from the 1280s. It passed to the Trussell family of Warmingham in the 14th century.

That William Trussell ever became heir to the extensive Trussell estates was due to the failure of his wealthy kinswoman, Margaret Trussell, wife of Sir Fulk Pembridge* of Tong castle, to produce a child. Margaret died in June 1399 leaving William, then aged 14, the grandson of her uncle, Sir Warin Trussell, as next heir to Kibblestone and Acton in Staffordshire, Sheriff Hales on the Staffordshire border with Shropshire, five manors in Northamptonshire, Shottesbrook, Eton Hastings and other property in Berkshire and four manors, the bailiwick of the east gate of the city of Chester and land in the forest of Delamere elsewhere in the palatinate.

The estates passed from the Trussells c. 1500 to the Veres, earls of Oxford via John the 15th Earl. After its sale by Edward de Vere, 17th earl, in 1580, it passed successively to Hugh Beeston, Sir Thomas Egerton, and the Wright family, whose descendant sold it in the mid 18th century to William Hanmer of Iscoyd.

Hanmer's daughter Esther married Assheton Curzon, later 1st Viscount Curzon, whose grandson and heir R. W. P. Curzon-Howe, 1st Earl Howe, developed the estate, in part as Curzon Park, then disparaged as 'a cold bleak hill', in the 1840s.

Sources and Links

 * The complicated history of the Beestons;
 * The Golf Club;