Asthall Manor

Asthall Manor is a gabled Jacobean Cotswold manor house in Asthall, Oxfordshire. It was built in about 1620 and altered and enlarged in about 1916.

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. The core of the current building at Asthall was built in 1620 for Sir William Jones on the site of the mediaeval hall. 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. The architect Charles Bateman altered and enlarged the house in 1916. In 1920 a former barn was converted to a ballroom 1920 and joined to the main house by a cloister. In 1926 the house was sold to Thomas Hardcastle and was purchased by the current owners in 1997 on the death of Hardcastle's son.

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