North Aston

The Domesday Book records that in 1086 Edward of Salisbury, High Sheriff of Wiltshire, held the over-lordship of the manor of North Aston, and that through him it became attached to the manor of Amesbury.[3] From Edward, North Aston descended through his son Patrick to his grandson Patrick of Salisbury, 1st Earl of Salisbury (died 1168).[3] The overlordship descended with the Earls of Salisbury to Margaret Longespée, 4th Countess of Salisbury and thence to her daughter and heiress Alice de Lacy, 3rd Countess of Lincoln (died 1348) who was also 5th Countess of Salisbury.[3] Alice was married to Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster but in 1322 he was deposed by a party of barons and executed.

One of the barons, Hugh Despenser the Younger, obtained North Aston, which was now a manor of two and a half knight's fees.[3] However, in 1326 Despenser was executed for treason. It is not clear whether the Crown re granted the manor of North Aston immediately after Despenser's death, but by 1389 William de Montacute, 2nd Earl of Salisbury held it with the manor of Amesbury.[3] By the late 14th century the Earls of March held an estate of one knight's fee at North Aston as part of the barony of Clifford Castle.[3] This is likely to be because Margaret Longespée inherited the barony of Clifford from her grandfather Walter de Clifford (died 1263).[3]

St Mary the Virgin parish church: 15th-century alabaster monument to a knight and his lady; reputedly John and Alicia Anne

In 1086 Edward of Salisbury's tenant at North Aston was Anchetil de Greye.[3] The tenancy had passed to the Trivet family by 1279 and to the Anne family by the middle of the 15th century.[3] In 1554, on the death of a John Anne, North Aston passed to Sir Robert Broke, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; possibly through the marriage of John Anne's granddaughter to Robert Broke's son.[3] The manor descended via Broke's son John and grandson Sir Basil (died 1646) to Thomas Brooke. Sir Basil Brooke and his son were recusants and Thomas was a Royalist, so in 1653 the Commonwealth authorities sequestrated his estates.[3] The Parliamentarian Major John Wildman, who speculated in confiscated lands, bought North Aston[3] but in 1655 he was jailed. Thomas Brooke seems to have recovered the manor thereafter, as his sister Frances was married there in 1656.[3] Thomas's grandson Basil inherited North Aston in 1687, and it remained in the Brooke family until Basil's widow Winifred died in 1716 leaving North Aston to another recusant: Henrietta Fermor, sister of James Fermor of Tusmore.[3]

Soon afterwards Henrietta seems to have sold the estate to Anthony Rowe, Clerk of the Green Cloth.[3] Rowe's son-in-law Trevor Hill, 1st Viscount Hillsborough inherited North Aston from him but sold it in 1733.[3] The buyer was Charles Oldfield, a Jamaica merchant who on his death in about 1740 gave the estate to his friend Charles Bowles.[3] Three generations of the Bowles family held the estate, the last being Charles Oldfield Bowles who in 1862 sold it to William Foster-Melliar.[3] When Foster-Melliar died in 1906 a Captain John Taylor of Southgate, Middlesex bought North Aston, which included a 990 acres (400 ha) estate.[3] In 1911 Capt. Taylor moved to North Aston Manor and sold North Aston Hall, 200 acres (81 ha) and part of the village to Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford.[3] Lionel Hichens, chairman of Cammell Laird, bought North Aston Hall in 1929 and his family still owned it in 1980.[3]

The present North Aston Manor House is an H-shaped 16,970 square feet (1,577 m²) building of which the central part was probably the hall of a 15th-century house[4] or earlier. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 the neighbouring and ultimately much larger North Aston Hall became the primary home of the lords of the manor of North Aston, while the manor house became one of the main farm houses of the estate. Occupied by various tenants, the property was called Great House Farm during the 18th and 19th centuries, later Manor House Farm. In the 1930s Captain John Vickris Taylor had a new house built on land that had once formed part of the tract associated with Great House Farm, and called this Manor Farm. In 1976 the Captain's son, Colonel Anthony Taylor, sold the Manor itself to Charles Mackenzie Hill, who subsequently also bought North Aston Hall.[5]

North Aston Hall is a large Jacobethan country house built in the 17th century[6] The ten-bay front was added in the 18th century and the present windows and parapet were added in about 1850.[4]