Goodwyn’s Rental and The Old Ship

Three hundred and sixty years ago today, a surveyor named Goodwyn compiled a rental for the town of Brighthelmstone. Known ever since as Goodwyn’s Rental, it is the earliest surviving document to give a detailed account of property ownership along the seafront. Most significantly, it records the Old Ship, a tavern that stood directly on the beach and would later become Brighton’s first great hotel. Owned then by Richard Gilham, the Ship was already well established enough to be recognised in this roll of holdings.

Goodwyn’s Rental rental, dated 30 August 1665, lists some two hundred and twenty properties, covering the length of the town from east to west, but it is those facing the sea that now seem the most evocative. The shingle was not yet hemmed in by groynes or promenades, but the Ship looked south across open water much as it does today, and its mention shows how the town’s fortunes were already tied to the beach. By setting down ownerships and tenancies, Goodwyn’s Rental provides a snapshot of Brighton before the later century’s storms and rebuilding, an early record of the way houses and taverns clustered against the cliff line.

The document is also remarkable for what it says about leisure. Among the listings is reference to a bowling green, providing rare evidence of organised recreation in seventeenth-century Brighton. This was no rustic farming village but a town where visitors and townspeople alike could spend their hours in play. The inclusion of such a facility underlines the breadth of life the surveyor was attempting to capture, not only houses and yards but amenities that gave the town its character.

Read today, Goodwyn’s Rental is more than an account of land and rent. It fixes Brighton’s early connection to its shoreline, records the first great beachfront inn, and reveals that even in 1665 entertainment was part of the town’s appeal. The Old Ship would grow in renown, the bowling green would have successors, and the beachfront would become the defining edge of the town. In its dry listings of tenants and properties, Goodwyn’s Rental holds within it the beginnings of Brighton’s story as a place shaped by the sea and enjoyed for its pleasures.

I’ve used the earliest image of The Old Ship I can find, from A Peep into the Past: Brighton in Olden Time with Glances at the Present by John George Bishop, freely available to read online at Internet Archive. And the image of Goodwyn’s Rental comes from The Keep’s Facebook page.