Here is a brief history of the house.

 With thanks and acknowledgement to Emmeline Garnett.

Cantsfield House is almost certainly on a very old site, although we cannot track its history back further than the middle of the sixteenth century.

The house was owned by the Carrington family in the earliest records, and Francis Carrington had presumably modernised his house before the Hearth Tax, possibly in the year 1661. The second upgrading, in 1686, when Francis was already sixty, is marked by the datestone over the present back door.

The house has been so thoroughly and frequently altered and added to that it is extremely difficult to make any guesses as to its various stages, but it is safe to assume that a fine door with a carved and moulded lintel was not the only improvement added at that date. Perhaps the large kitchen chimney which juts out at the back, the back staircase, the mullioned second-storey window (a real status symbol this) and the remains of an outside door which seems to have led into a half-buried cellar or milkhouse, belong to 1686, but it is very difficult to make these features hang together coherently with the walls which might have been outside walls. The majority of yeoman houses at the time have predictable ground plans which do not vary widely, but this one does not seem to fit, a fact which suggests a very complex history.

By 1686 Francis Carrington's family had dwindled to three daughters. Jennet, as the eldest, was her father's heir to the Cantsfield property, which now became a Tatham property as she had married into that family.

The Richard Tatham who married Jennet Carrington was of Burrow. He died in 1698, at an early age, before his father-in-law, while his son John (1688-1745) was only a child. That son married in 1718 his third cousin Isabella Fenwick of Burrow Hall, which lifted the young couple straight way to the edge of petty gentrydom, but although he was his father's heir, he had to wait until his mother's death to have full control of the property. By local custom, the widow had her "thirds": a third of her husband's property, for life. Jennet Tatham died in 1725, and if the datestone is correct, John seems to have lost no time in embarking on the next and apparently most thorough refurbishment of the house.

We need have no hesitation in saying that the neat and even elegant front block, consisting of two good rooms linked by the front door and passage, and the two main bedrooms upstairs with a dressing- or powder-room between, are mainly unchanged from the first half of the eighteenth century. The datestone seems to make it one of the earliest houses in the Lune Valley to show the new genteel symmetry of sashed windows on either side of a central door.

Although the 1725 datestone over the front door is possibly of a later pattern, possibly as late as 1754 or even later, it can be said with certainty that, as with a number of other local houses, the new front was attached to the old back, probably with no more alterations than were needed to make the two fit, more or less, together.

With its "modern" frontage so satisfactorily visible from the road, and no doubt also with the front garden symmetrically landscaped for the pleasure of its owners and the envy of the

neighbours, Cantsfield House (it was probably now known by this name) immediately took precedence in the village.

With various undated modifications, probably including the kitchen and scullery in the early part of the 19th century, the house remained in the family until the early 20th century. In the 1920 's, it was sold, with its four hundred years of family history, and whatever remained of the estate, to Ferdinand Holtzmann. a retired stuff and shoddy dealer from Bradford.

In 1950 the house was sold by Ferdinand’s executors to the Howsons, and in 1969 by them to Harold Morris, and subsequent conveyances relate to the gradual break-up of the estate:

Following the death of Harold Morris in 1971 Cantsfield House was sold in to Thomas Bowker and then in 1982 to the Churchill family who then sold to the Burgesses in 2000.