The Rutlands were an old Essex family who are recorded in and around Saffron Walden from about 1450. On 4 August 1803, George Rutland of Church Farm, married Harriet Lydia Green at St Andrew’s: they had four daughters. George died in 1832, leaving everything to his wife. In the 1842 tithe map, Harriet is recorded as owning about 25 acres of land to the north and east of Campions End, including Hawthorns and the farm which later came to be known as Philips Farm and which burned down in the 1920s. But she also owned a significant number of houses in the cenre of the village and farmed the several hundred acres of Church Farm, stretching from Wincelow Hall Road in the west of the village to the corner of Hempstead Wood in the east. When she died on 1 December 1859, she left an endowment to found the almshouses for older residents of Hempsteadwho are poor, invalid or infirm. The almshouses are still properly known as ‘Miss Rutland’s Cottages’.
