Asthall Manor is a gabled Jacobean Cotswold manor house in Asthall, Oxfordshire. It was built in about 1620 [1] and altered and enlarged in about 1916. [1] The house is Grade II listed on the National Heritage List for England. [2]
Early in the 20th century, the house was the childhood home of the Mitford sisters.
Asthall Manor is a vernacular two-storey house with attics, built of local Cotswold limestone on an irregular H-plan with mullioned and mullioned-transomed windows and a stone-slated roof typical of the area. There are records of a house on the site since 1272 when Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, owned a house on the site worth 12d. In 1304 the curia, garden and fish pond were valued at 10 shillings. [3] The core of the current building at Asthall was built in 1620 [1] [4] for Sir William Jones on the site of the mediaeval hall. [5]
In 1688 the estate was sold to Sir Edmund Fettiplace; it stayed in branches of the same family for the next 130 years when it was sold to John Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, in 1810. During their 116-year tenure, the Freeman-Mitfords made many alterations to the house including the installation in 1899 of an electric power system powered by a water turbine fed by the River Windrush. [3] The architect Charles Bateman altered and enlarged the house in 1916. [1] In 1920, a former barn was converted to a ballroom and joined to the main house by a cloister.[ citation needed ] In 1926, the house was sold by the 2nd Baron Redesdale to Thomas Hardcastle and was purchased by the current owners in 1997 on the death of Hardcastle's son.
David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (2nd creation), father of the Mitford sisters, inherited Asthall Manor on the death of his father in August 1916 [6] and in 1919 moved his family there from Batsford Park. The two youngest of the Mitford sisters, Jessica and Deborah, later Duchess of Devonshire, were born at Asthall in 1917 and 1920 respectively. Their sister Diana had an appendectomy on the spare-bedroom table. [7] The Mitfords were great socialites, and Asthall hosted frequent hunting and shooting weekend parties, regular guests included Clementine Churchill, Frederick Lindemann and Walter Sickert.[ citation needed ] Nancy Mitford's fictional Alconleigh in The Pursuit of Love is based largely on Asthall, [8] and family life there is described in Jessica Mitford's autobiographical Hons and Rebels . [6]
Lord Redesdale had never planned to make Asthall Manor a permanent home, and in 1926 the family moved into nearby Swinbrook House which Redesdale had had built on the site of a derelict farm. The Mitfords subsequently leased 26 Rutland Gate in London's Knightsbridge district following the sale of Asthall. [9]
The garden at Asthall Manor covers 6 acres (2.4 ha). [10] It was created for the current owners of Asthall by Julian and Isobel Bannerman (best known for their work for Prince Charles at Highgrove House) [8] and includes traditional gardens of herbaceous borders and lawns, contemporary parterres and areas of wild woodland and wildflowers running down to water-meadows by the River Windrush. [10]
Asthall Manor remains primarily a private family home, although the ballroom is occasionally used for functions and Asthall Manor's garden provides the setting for "On Form", [11] a biennial exhibition of contemporary sculpture in stone as well as small outdoor musical events. [8]
The Mitford family is an aristocratic English family, whose principal line had its seats at Mitford, Northumberland. Several heads of the family served as High Sheriff of Northumberland. A junior line, with seats at Newton Park, Northumberland, and Exbury House, Hampshire, descends via the historian William Mitford (1744–1827) and were twice elevated to the British peerage, in 1802 and 1902, under the title Baron Redesdale.
Nancy Freeman-Mitford, known as Nancy Mitford, was an English novelist, biographer, and journalist. The eldest of the Mitford sisters, she was regarded as one of the "bright young things" on the London social scene in the inter-war period. She wrote several novels about upper-class life in England and France, and is considered a sharp and often provocative wit. She also has a reputation as a writer of popular historical biographies.
Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.
Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was an English aristocrat, writer, memoirist, and socialite. She was the youngest and last-surviving of the six Mitford sisters, who were prominent members of British society in the 1930s and 1940s.
Baron Redesdale, of Redesdale in the County of Northumberland, is a title that has been created twice in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was firstly created in 1802 for the lawyer and politician Sir John Mitford. The title was created anew in 1902 for the former's cousin Algernon Bertram Mitford.
John Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, PC, KC, FRS, known as Sir John Mitford between 1793 and 1802, was an English lawyer and politician. He was Speaker of the House of Commons between 1801 and 1802 and Lord Chancellor of Ireland between 1802 and 1806.
Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale,, was a British diplomat, collector, and writer who wrote as A.B. Mitford. His most notable work is Tales of Old Japan (1871). Nicknamed "Berty", he was the paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters.
Asthall or Asthal is a village and civil parish on the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, about 6 miles (10 km) west of Witney. It includes the hamlets of Asthall Leigh, Field Assarts, Stonelands, Worsham and part of Fordwells. The 2011 Census recorded the parish's population as 252. Asthall village is just south of the River Windrush, which also forms the south-eastern part of its boundary. The remainder of the parish including all of its hamlets lie north of the river. A minor road through Fordwells forms most of the parish's northern boundary. Most of the remainder of the parish's boundary is formed by field boundaries.
Swinbrook is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Swinbrook and Widford, in the West Oxfordshire district, in the county of Oxfordshire, England. It is on the River Windrush, about 2 miles (3 km) east of Burford. Widford is a hamlet about 0.5 miles (800 m) west of Swinbrook. The 2011 Census recorded the population of Swinbrook and Widford as 139.
David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, was a British peer, soldier, and landowner. He was the father of the Mitford sisters, in whose various novels and memoirs he is depicted.
Major Thomas David Freeman-Mitford was the only son of the 2nd Baron Redesdale and brother of the Mitford Sisters.
Pamela Freeman-Mitford was one of the Mitford sisters.
Mitford may refer to:
Rupert Bertram Mitford, 6th Baron Redesdale, Baron Mitford, is a British hereditary peer, Liberal Democrat politician and member of the prominent Mitford family.
Batsford Arboretum is a 55-acre (220,000 m2) arboretum and botanical garden near Batsford in Gloucestershire, England, about 1½ miles north-west of Moreton-in-Marsh, at grid reference SP187339. It is owned and run by the Batsford Foundation, a registered charity, and is open to the public daily throughout most of the year.
Taynton is a village and civil parish about 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) northwest of Burford in West Oxfordshire. The village is on Coombe Brook, a tributary of the River Windrush. The parish is bounded in the south by the River Windrush, in the north partly by Coombe Brook and its tributary Hazelden Brook, in the west by the county boundary with Gloucestershire and in the east by field boundaries. The 2001 Census recorded the parish's population as 108.
26 Rutland Gate is a large, detached house on Rutland Gate in the Knightsbridge district of London SW7. The house is listed Grade II, as is the 19th-century cast iron street light outside the house.
Asthall barrow is a high-status Anglo-Saxon burial mound from the seventh century AD. It is located in Asthall, Oxfordshire, and was excavated in 1923 and 1924.
Little Wolford is a hamlet and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district of Warwickshire, England. With the neighbouring parish of Great Wolford it is part of 'The Wolfords'. Little Wolford is significant for its Grade II* listed 15th- to 16th-century Little Wolford Manor.
Redesdale Hall, also referred to as Moreton-in-Marsh Town Hall, is a municipal building in the High Street, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, England. The building, which is used as an events venue, is a Grade II listed building.