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Heythrop is a windswept village high up to the north-east above Chipping
Norton. It is at its best in early February when the verges which border the
village street are carpeted with snowdrops, or on a warm still July afternoon
when the lime trees are in full flower and the only sound is of a distant
lawnmower. The chances are that walking along the street you will meet nothing
apart from an occasional tractor, for Heythrop is still, as it has always been,
off the beaten track and its inhabitants are few. Rarely has its population,
even with the people from the surrounding farms, reached 200 persons.
The village mentioned in the Domesday survey has left few traces today apart
from the chancel of the old church, into the arch of which has been rebuilt the
Norman doorway of the nave pulled down in the 19th century, and faint
indications of the ridge and furrow cultivation of an earlier age traceable when
the light is favourable. Substantially it is still the model village built in
1873 by Albert Brassey. His estate, centred on Heythrop Hall, was the wedding
gift of Thomas Brassey the millionaire railway contractor, to his third son. As
in other Qxfordshire villages wealth made in industry in one generation
contributed to agricultural development in the next.
Before 1873 the village seems to have consisted of one or two cottages at most,
a farmhouse and the church, and had been described as decayed or depopulated at
intervals since the 14th century. Heythrop Hall, built in the early 18th century
by the 12th earl of Shrewsbury, was one of the great houses of the county with
its park laid out to the south-east in the Italian manner, but when the earldom
passed to a Catholic branch of the Talbot family the owner of the house withdrew
from public life and the village languished. Finally after a disastrous fire in
1831 the house was abandoned as an empty shell.
Although the golden age of English farming was already coming to an end, Albert
was able with the resources inherited from his father to set out to rebuild the
interior of Heythrop Hall, to restore the gardens and great stands of trees
stretching down to the Banbury road, and to build his model village. There was
no shop lest it should tempt the women to stand and gossip and no inn for fear
of drunkenness, but the houses, constructed with stone from the local quarry,
were furnished with the latest conveniences of the time — damp courses,
underground water storage tanks, fed from the gutters, and outside closets with
nightsoil tanks vented with soil pipes. The houses were surrounded with ample
gardens and shelter belts of trees were planted to protect them from the north
and east winds. The new church, built just inside the park, was sited to be the
focus of the village. It was constructed to the design of A. W. Blomfield on a
massive scale, with stone from the nave of the old church and from the Catholic
chapel in the grounds of the Hall, in the popular Victorian Gothic style. Behind
it a rectory of equally generous proportions replaced the old farmhouse. A
school with an attached schoolhouse and a new lodge completed the building.
From the Hall the Brasseys overlooked village affairs. Mrs Brassey took a
special interest in the cultivation of the village gardens, the best efforts
being rewarded with the prize of a sovereign, quite a sum when wages were low.
Forty indoor staff were needed to run the Hall and the park and gardens employed
the services of a large force of gardeners, woodmen and gamekeepers. Many of
these people must have come from Heythrop, others being recruited from villages
around. Entertaining at the Hall was on a grand scale — one local farmer tells
of a thousand guests expected in 1876 for a dinner to mark the first public meet
of the Heythrop Hunt. Hunting took up a good deal of Albert Brassey’s time after
he took over the Duke of Beaufort’s North Oxfordshire pack of hounds in 1873. He
also played a prominent part in local affairs, sitting on the local bench and
board of guardians, serving as president of the Oxfordshire County Agricultural
Show and becoming mayor of Chipping Norton. A caring employer, he was in the
last years of his life supporting the scheme for a memorial hospital there.
With his death in 1918 the economic foundation of all these activities
collapsed. The Hall had to be sold to meet death duties, was eventually taken
over by the Society of Jesus as a seminary and in 1969 was bought by the
National Westminster Bank for a Management Development College. The link with
the Hall broken, the village changed its character as the 20th century brought
mechanisation to farming and decreased the demand for labourers.
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