MANOR

By 1174, the de Olepenne family had lived at Owlpen for two generations; they were loyal subjects to their overlords, the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle. Margery de Olepenne married Thomas Daunt in c. 1462 and their son Christopher built the central hall and east wing of the existing manor house. Christopher’s eldest son, Thomas II married Alice Throckmarton and their eldest son, Henry carried out several alterations to the house in 1584-6. Henry had one surviving child, a daughter Frances who married John Bridgeman. Bridgeman claimed possession of the house on behalf of his wife but after twelve years, Frances’s uncle, Thomas III was successful in his claim that the estate could only pass through male heirs. Thomas III rebuilt the west wing in 1616, as well as carrying out some internal alterations. After Thomas’s death in 1621, the Daunts spent much of their time in and in 1706, the house fell into disrepair.

Fourteen years later, Thomas IV inherited the house and made changes to both the interior and exterior of the house and remodelled the gardens. Thomas solved the problem of the steep hillside, by creating a terraced garden. The accounts of the period are in Archives and list the ‘Acton stone for stepps’, the use of box (probably from Box and Boxell, both nearby), peach, nectarine and apricot trees, turf, gravel and ‘greens’; maybe the yew trees that are still growing. Thomas VII died in 1803 and the house again was deserted. It was inherited by Mary, Thomas’s great-niece who on her marriage to Thomas Stoughton in 1815 decided to build a new house, a mile away, and call it Owlpen House.

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In July 1924, the trustees of Mrs Rose Trent-Stoughton sold the original house and nine acres of land to for £3,200. After reading architecture at Cambridge, Jewson had started work for the East Anglian architect Herbert Ibberson. After finishing his apprenticeship, Ibberson suggested that Jewson visited while on a bicycling holiday in the . Gimson was the head of the Cotswold Art and Crafts Movement, and a follower of . Jewson never left.

Jewson lived in Sapperton, joined the Art-Workers Guild in 1918 and became a Member of the Society of Protection of Ancient Buildings. He also worked with his father-in-law Ernest Barnsely and after the death of Barnsley in 1925, Jewson supervised the completion of .

In By Chance I Did Rove, Jewson described his first encounter with Owlpen:

Another excursion was ... to Owlpen, a very beautiful and romantically situated old house, which had been deserted by its owners for a new mansion about a mile away a century before. The house was rapidly falling into complete decay, but a caretaker lived in a kitchen wing and would shew some of the rooms to visitors, including one the walls of which were hung with painted canvas, of the kind Falstaff recommended to Mistress Quickly.

The terraced gardens with a yew parlour and groups of great clipped yews remained just as they were in the time of Queen Anne, a gardener being kept to look after them…In spite of the dilapidation of the house, which was so far advanced that one of the main roof trusses had given way, the great stone bay window had become almost detached from the wall and huge roots of ivy had grown right across some of the floors, it seemed to me that such an exceptionally beautiful and interesting old house might still be saved.

After two years of restoration, Jewson sold the Manor for £9000 to Barbara Crohan. A cousin of Clive Bell, she held numerous parties at the house and the gardens became well known: Avray Tipping [Country Life, 1906], Geoffrey Jellicoe and Vita Sackville-West all described Owlpen. Sackville-West wrote in English County Houses, 1941: ‘Owlpen, that tiny grey manor-house, cowering amongst its enormous yews, yews that make rooms in the garden with walls taller than any rooms in the house; dark, secret rooms of yew hiding in the slope of the valley.’ Gertrude Jekyll was also a visitor: ‘Among little hillside gardens treated in a formal fashion, none is more delightful than that of …with what modesty the house nestles against the hillside and seeks to hide itself amidst regiments of yews.’

After Crohan’s death in 1963, Francis Pagan bought Owlpen and sold it in 1974 to the present owners Sir Nicholas and Lady Mander; they have bought back much of the Estate.

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