| Description | These Four Mills (not to be confused with the Three Mills, Newham, on the eastern bank of the Lea), had disappeared by the time of the 1st edition of Ordnance Survey, when the site was occupied by a gin distillery. The earliest deed in this group, in which Sir Arthur Ingram conveyed three watermills, implies that in fact there were already at least six in the area, because although the Four Mills are referred to, only one of those he conveyed is described in relation to them. In a deed of 1632 a fourth, Bromley Mill, was added to the first three, but all are described as 'lately' built, indicating that the Four Mills place-name is more ancient, first referring to predecessors on roughly the same site.
The deeds were purchased by Poplar Library from the vendor one or two at a time and some gaps remain. A deed of 1668 (not acquired, but recited in a later deed) shows that the number of mills on the site had then grown to seven. By 1712 five of them were employed as corn mills, though the deeds of covenant between the leaseholder, George Godfrey, and the occupier are principally concerned with cloth beating, or fulling, for which several stocks on the site were used.
The interest shown in the site by leading politicians and lawyers seems significant. Ingram, a City financier and comptroller of the London custom house, must have acquired it as part of Bromley manor granted to him by the Crown about 1617 (The Survey of London, vol I: Bromley-by-Bow, ed. C.R.Ashbee (London, 1900), pp. 36-7). He was a close associate of James I's financial minister Lionel Cranfield, and made his own house in York available to Charles I's court in 1642; while Sir Humphrey Lynde, who acquired the site in 1625, was a prominent apologist for Anglo-Catholicism. On the opposite side of the political and religious divide, the Puritan MP Denzil Holles, famous for his role in Charles I's third Parliament (1629) and one of the five Members whom the king attempted to arrest for treason in 1642, acquired an interest in the Four Mills through his second marriage to Lady Jane Covert, widow and executrix of John Freke. |