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In 1720 Sir Robert Marsham, first Lord Romney, a
descendant of Sir Thomas Wyatt in the female line, acquired Sir Jacob
Astley’s Kent estates by exchange for his estates in Norfolk.*
From that time the progress of the castle was steadily downhill. Buck’s
view, engraved in 1735, shews the condition of the place about the time of
the transfer. In 1760, according to a note which I copied in the
Maidstone Museum, the castle was definitely converted into a farmhouse.
Plenty of sketches and engravings exist from this time on, but they give
little information that cannot be gathered from the building itself. They
shew it in an ever increasingly filthy and abandoned state, with the
courtyard full of beasts and their litter, and cluttered up with farm
refuse of every kind.
In 1792 the Lower Medway Navigation Company was incorporated,
and in 42 George III. it obtained, amongst other powers, the right of
building a lock at Allington. This put an end to the ford, which was
drowned out.
A drawing made in August 1822, now in the British
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Museum, shews the end of the long gallery still standing. Not long
afterwards there was a fire and it was burnt down. The lower storey of
this transversal building was presently patched up, I believe in 1829, and
part of it made into a brewhouse. The place of the long gallery was taken
by a new and very disfiguring tile roof, which I had the felicity of
pulling down when I re-erected the long gallery. At this time the remains
of the castle were divided into two farmhouses. Farmer Fauchon occupied
the west wing and the gate-house. He made cider in one of the upper rooms
of the Penchester lodgings, whilst the guard-room was his dairy. The room
over the gate-house was his bedroom, and there he died, its last
inhabitant. Mr. Pack lived in the Wyatt kitchen and the rooms above it and
above the old thirteenth-century kitchen, which itself was his dairy. When
Fauchon died about 1840 the west wing was abandoned, and at this time the
roof was torn off, the floors
* See Act of Parliament, 6 Geo. I.
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