Image: Cranborne manor, as seen today after eighteenth century rebuilding (photos: C.A. Stanford)
Acquired: 1509 (by inheritance)
Cranborn or Cranborne was a hunting preserve under King John in the thirteenth century, and a fortified house (sometimes called a “castle”) built there. Nothing is known about the appearance of this lodge by Tudor times, but records indicate that roofing and chimney repairs were undertaken for the “old lodge” at Cranborn in 1532, as well as paling and mowing maintenance for its park, so it it possible that Henry visited on one of his hunting trips.
The property apparently had left royal hands by the later Elizabethan period, however, as Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, had an early seventeenth-century hunting lodge constructed on site; some thirteenth-century portions of the house still remain.