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In 1777 new hot-houses and “Pineries” were built, and £175 paid for “two hot-houses full stocked with pine apples and plants.”

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Surrounding the house and gardens lies the park, with its valleys, hills, and woods, and its short brown turf closely bitten by deer and rabbits. Its beeches and bracken, its glades and valleys, greatly excited the admiration of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who visited it in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and she wrote with enthusiasm of shade rising above shade with amazing and magnificent grandeur, and of one beech in particular spreading “its light yet umbrageous fan” over a seat placed round the bole. With all its grandeur and luxuriance, she said, there was nothing about this beech heavy or formal; it was airy, though vast and majestic, and suggested an idea at once of the strength and fire of a hero. She would call a beech tree, she added, and this beech above every other, the hero of the forest, as the oak was called the king.

As I have said, the park was first enclosed by Bourchier in 1456, the year in which he bought Knole on the 30th of June. In the muniments at Lambeth are a number of papers relating to the expenses of this great builder, and there is the interesting fact that glass-making was carried on in the park, and I only wish that more detailed accounts existed of this industry, which, thanks to the Huguenots, had been pretty widely introduced into the South of England. I should like to know exactly where their glass-foundry was, and whether they made use of the sand on the portion known as the Furze-field, now a rabbit warren; and I should also very much like to know whether—as seems probable—they supplied any of the glass for the windows in the house.