- Foreword
- Shipton Court Revisited: an Assessment of the Historic Building
- The Lacys
- The Site of Shipton Court and the Manor House
- The Doveloft at Court Cottage
- The Reade Family
- The Most Mature Reflections
- Local Country Houses During Victoria’s Reign
- The Twentieth Century at Shipton Court
- The Dispersal of the Court Estate, 1913–1917
- The Pepper Family, 1901–1919
- The Thomsons, 1919–1931
- Life in Shipton Court in the Mid-Twentieth Century
- Court and School
- The Society’s Publications
Introduction to The Wychwoods Local History Society Journal No 19
SHIPTON COURT: Built c.1603 by the Lacey family, and one of the largest Jacobean houses in the country.
The interior was gutted in a drastic restoration of 1903 by Perkin and Bulmer, who retained no original work. The mullioned windows are also modern. They replace C18 sash-windows.
‘The entrance faces W. It is elegant and well proportioned, of eleven bays, with five narrow gables with kneelers and finials.’ So begins the description of Shipton Court in Pevsner, 1974.
In the summer of 2003 the Wychwood Local History Society marked the 400th anniversary of the building of Shipton Court with an exhibition and a garden party in the grounds. Over the past 22 years of the Society’s researches, little work has been undertaken about the Court, its owners and its place in the community.
This edition goes some way to compensate for this omission and in this journal we have brought together a number of articles about the Court and the people who have lived and worked there.
We start with a description of the Court as it is now, with an article which describes the site of the Court in relation to the manor and manor house of Shipton.
An account of the tangled history of the Lacy family who were responsible for the building of the Court leads to the sale of the property to the Reade family who retained ownership for 200 years before the last of the family, Sir John Chandos Reade, 7th Baronet died and left his estate to his butler, Joseph Wakefield, in 1868.
Wakefield changed his name to Reade and his son sold the estate to Fred Pepper who brought many changes, not least the restoration referred to by Pesvner which could arguably be said to have saved the building from destruction.
Shipton Court has had a number of owners during the twentieth century, culminating in the building being divided, with the front facade as a separate dwelling and six apartments at the rear, in 1978.
At the time of writing, as Shipton Court starts a new century, this front part of the building changes hands again and a new chapter begins for the Court.
Producing this journal has been an interesting exercise for the contributors as it is the first that focusses on a single subject. We hope we have told a good story.
Sue Jourdan, Joan Howard-Drake and Trudy Yates
[ Download Full Journal No 19 PDF here]
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