The Assize House

Brentwood Assize House was built in 1579 after land was purchased near "the flesh shambles" (the meat market) for construction of a new building in which Brentwood could hold courts and manage town business. The land was paid for by the inhabitants of the town with a substantial donation by one John Tyler. This building - the Assize House - was a large timber framed building with three gables facing onto the High Street. It also contained a lockup where arrested people could be held before trial.

It was repaired in 1698 and 1712, and in 1712 the ground floor was also let out as shops. By 1788 the building was being used as houses, shops, and a slaughterhouse. The facade of the building was restored and the timbers 're-carved in Elizabethan style' in 1841.

By the mid 1850s, there was a desire among the town council to either remodel the building so it was more useful to the town, or to build a new building on the site. In the end, the town decided to demolish it in preparation for building a new town hall on the site.

The intricately carved barge boards from the gables (probably those carved in 1841, rather than the originals) were saved. Curiously, a surviving photograph of Cornelius Butler from c1870 shows the carved boards in the background reused in a brick building, perhaps in the grounds of his house on the High Street. They were still in existence in the early 1900s apparently in storage in Crown Street. The carved bargeboards on Shen Place Almshouses are almost exact copies of them. The original bargeboards are now lost - perhaps destroyed during the second world war when Crown Street was badly bombed.