Chapter 2: Matthew Fagg
Date of completion
The house itself was evidently constructed between August 1817 and the later months of 1819. The survival of assessments for churchwardens’ rates and poor rates for St Clement’s, Hastings, is unfortunately erratic: a full series of poor rate assessments exists up to December 1818 and from May 1833 onwards, but there are only scattered survivals in between. Fagg fails to appear in the existing series of poor rate assessments up to the end of 1818, and he also fails to appear in a church rate assessment for 9 July 1818.15 However, he does appear in an assessment for 23 December 1819 (the only extant rate book for that year), paying a rate of 16s, so by then the house must have been completed and was being lived in. Fagg then recurs in a further extant assessment for 27 June 1822, paying 17s, while in ‘A Scale for an Assessment for the necessary Relief of the Poor’ dated 23 December 1822, which itemises the properties covered rather than just giving a personal liability, he is linked with two properties, Exmouth House and Exmouth Cottage (for the building of which, see chapter 4, below). The figures given are ‘Est[imated] Rents’ -- £22.00 for Exmouth House and £14.80 for Exmouth Cottage -- with the ‘Tax’ respectively as 18s 4d and 11s 8d.16
15 East Sussex Record Office PAR 367/30/270 et seq. (278 is the assessment for December 1818; 279 that for April 1833); PAR 367/8/17.
16 PAR 367/8/18-19; PAR 367/30/2/16. In a poor rate book of 22 November 1837, PAR 367/30/1/291, the gross estimated value of the house is given as £50 and its rateable value as £48.10s.