Horton Court

Horton Court is a stone-built 16th century manor house in Horton, near Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, England. The building retains a 12th-century Norman hall, and displays some of the earliest Renaissance decorative motifs used in England. It has been a National Trust property since 1949.

The house was built in about 1521 by Rev. William Knight (d. 1547), Prothonotary to the Holy See, and later Bishop of Bath and Wells. The house was empty from 2008 to 2011 but the National Trust opened the ground floor on Friday and Sunday afternoons during July and August 2011 and are actively considering how to make it more readily accessible to the public. It is a grade I listed building.

Within the grounds is a Grade I listed ambulatory, built for William Knight around 1527-29.

Early in the 12th century Hubert de Rye donated the manor to the See of Sarum, which used the revenues to endow a prebend. An early Hubert of Ryes, is known in legend as the loyal vassal who saved the life of Duke William of Normandy in his flight from Valognes during a revolt in 1047. He was the father of Eudo Dapifer. A man by the same name in 1164 donated the church of Aslackby, Lincolnshire, to the Knights Templar. The first known holder of the prebend was Robert de Beaufeu, around 1150. It is believed he was the builder of the Norman great hall, which still survives as the core of the present 16th-century house built by Rev. William Knight (1476–1547), a prebendary from 1517. Knight attended Oxford University and Ferrara University, Italy and travelled on many occasions to Italy on diplomatic missions for King Henry VIII (1509–1547). He attended the king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1521 and in 1527 negotiated with the Pope over Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. He was Bishop of Bath and Wells from 1541 until his death in 1547. During his travels he witnessed the art of the Italian Renaissance. He incorporated some of the motifs he had seen abroad into the new house he built in about 1521 at Horton around the Norman hall, and the house is thus one of the earliest English buildings, comparable to Sutton Place, Surrey, and Hampton Court, to show Renaissance design features, most notably in the grotesque jambs of the front door. His armorials can be seen above the front door and over the entrance hall fireplace, and consist of two addorsed bird's necks and heads emerging from a demi-sun. The supporters are two grotesque mermaids. The crest, which surmounts the escutcheon directly, consists of a prothonotary's hat, which is similar to that of a cardinal, but is black with three rows of tassels in place of five. The detached Italianate ambulatory or loggia built by Knight survives.

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