Waterperry Manor, Oxfordshire, England

In 1086 WATERPERRY belonged to Robert d'Oilly. The property was later held as 2 knights' fees and the overlordship descended with that of the other d'Oilly estates to the earls of Warwick in the 13th century, to Thomas Chaucer, and then to his daughter Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, in the 15th. After her death in 1475 it lapsed.

The tenant in 1086 was an unidentified Robert, probably the Robert son of Walter who held Oakley of Robert d'Oilly. The next known tenant was Lovel de Brai, holding in about 1130; he was also lord of Oakley and Worminghall (Bucks.). He was succeeded by his son Fulk, and then by Emma de Peri, daughter and heiress of Fulk, who probably in about 1154 married William Fitzellis. He and his wife were generous benefactors of Oseney Abbey and St. Frideswide's, to whom they granted Worminghall church. In about 1180, William Fitzellis became a canon in Newburgh Priory (Yorks.).

Emma Fitzellis began by being a tenant of the whole manor, which included the hamlet of Ledhale (Ledall); but she granted half a hide in Ledhale to Oseney, when her son Henry became a canon there, and between 1180 and 1188 lost a third of the remainder of the whole manor to Richard de Beaufeu as a result of a lawsuit.Consequently she asked Oseney to return her gift of 2 virgates in Ledhale; 'sympathising with her grief', they compromised by returning 1 virgate. The arrangement with Richard de Beaufeu was that he would hold the whole estate of the d'Oillys, and Emma Fitzellis would hold two-thirds of him. No explanation of this transaction has been found, but it looks as if the families had intermarried and that the Beaufeus' claim to a third of the manor may have been a claim to dower. Their overlordship of the Fitzellis manor continued. Until the 16th century there were 2 fees, Beaufeus' and Fitzellises'. The latter was said to be held of the Beaufeus as late as 1375.

During the 13th century there were mesne tenants between the earls of Warwick and the Beaufeus. In 1242–3 the manor was held by a Reynold son of Herbert, and in 1255 and 1279 by Reynold son of Peter, who appears to have been the son of Peter FitzHerbert, the lord marcher of Blaenllyfni.

Richard Beaufeu had two sons, Henry and Richard.It is possible that Henry inherited Waterperry but forfeited it owing to his opposition to King John. In any case in 1205 Richard de Beaufeu recovered 100 solidates of land in Waterperry which his brother Henry had given him, and of which Richard had been disseised because of Henry's withdrawal from the king's service. In 1246 Richard died, holding a third of Waterperry and Ledhale in demesne and the overlordship of the other two-thirds. His son Henry may have remained in Normandy, for in 1254 John FitzNiel, lord of Boarstall, and the father-in-law of William Fitzellis's son Thomas, seems to have held the Beaufeu manor, and it is recorded that 10 librates of Henry Beaufeu's land in Waterperry were forfeit in 1258–9 but Henry appears to have been in possession of Waterperry in 1262, and to have died in or before 1273, when his widow Agnes (d. 1275–6) and his son Richard were at law with Oseney. In 1279 Richard Beaufeu held the Beaufeu fee in Waterperry, and also the wardship of Robert Fitzellis, his undertenant. Roger Beaufeu, who had the wardship of the young Robert Fitzellis in 1291–2, and was assaulted at Waterperry in 1298, belonged to the same family, but does not seem to have been in the direct line of descent.

By 1316 another Richard Beaufeu, perhaps his son, held the fee. He was dead by 1349–50, when his heirs were holding Waterperry. With him the direct male line of the Beaufeus seems to have died. No relationship with Thomas Beaufeu, collector of the subsidy in Oxfordshire in 1352, has been traced, and it looks as if the Beaufeu manor descended to a daughter, the Isabel Beaufeu whose brass is in Waterperry church. She married Richard Rusholm and had died before 1375, when Richard Foster was granted the keeping of the fee. must have been minors. Cecily or Celia Rusholm, who was dead by 1382, had married Lambert Foster; her sister also seems to have been dead, and the Beaufeu fee descended through the Foster family. In 1428 the heirs of Lambert Foster, son of Lambert Foster, held one fee in Waterperry and Ledhale, and in 1517 Walter Curson had 200 acres in Waterperry which he leased from Sir Edmund Foster of Southampton. He probably later bought this land, evidently the original Beaufeu fee of 9½ virgates, from the Fosters. His grandson Vincent acquired the rest of the original manor of Waterperry, which was thus united again as one property.

Emma de Peri, who held the two-thirds of Waterperry which comprised the Fitzellis fee, was still alive in 1194, when she made good her claim to her inheritance in Oakley (Bucks.). She was succeeded by her son William (II), whose wife was Rose de la Rokele, at one time lady of Tiddington. On his death in 1227,William (III) Fitzellis, who had a wife, Margery, and children,succeeded. He must have died between 1263 and 1279, when Waterperry was held by a child, Robert, son of Thomas Fitzellis and his wife Joan, daughter of John FitzNiel,lord of Boarstall. Thomas was probably the son of William (III) Fitzellis and his wife Margery. After 1277, when Thomas Fitzellis was dead, the descent of the Fitzellis family is confused.

Robert Fitzellis, still a minor in 1292, was dead by 1300 and was succeeded by another Robert, probably his son, who was a minor in 1302. He was holding the Fitzellis fee in 1316 and land in Buckinghamshire and Wiltshire. With his death in or before 1346, the direct male line of Fitzellis came to an end. His widow Margaret, the daughter and coheir of William Pippard, who married as her second husband Warin de Lisle, held the Fitzellis fee until her death in 1375.

The Waterperry estate and her husband's other lands then descended to John Duyn, Robert Fitzellis's great-nephew. When he came of age in 1382, he probably changed his name to Fitzellis and so is the same as the John Fitzellis who died in 1395 in possession of Waterperry. Besides the Fitzellis lands, he held a third of the manor of Yattendon (Berks.) through his grandmother Isabel de la Beche, the sister of John de la Beche. In 1393 he was outlawed for debt. His financial difficulties probably account for the granting away for life of much of the family's property at the end of the 14th and in the early 15th century. He granted his Waterperry property for life to Sir William Lisle the younger, who in 1400 is spoken of as 'of Waterperry'. Oakley was held for a period by John Fitzellis's daughter Maud and her husband Robert James. When John Fitzellis died in 1395 his son John was a minor; he was alive in 1433, when he was listed among the gentry of Oxford, but had probably been succeeded by a son Robert by 1438.

It is this Robert Fitzellis, a Yorkist, and his wife Margaret, who are depicted in the glass of Waterperry church. It is not clear when he died, but his wife, the daughter of William Fawkener, was a widow at her death in 1469. Her heiress was her granddaughter Sibyl, who was six years old and already married to George Ingleton. The Ingletons were a prominent Yorkist family and lived at Thornton (Bucks.). George Ingleton died in 1494; the date of Sibyl's death is uncertain.

The heir to the Fitzellis property in Waterperry, Oakley, Thornton, and Worminghall was their son Robert, who married Anne, the daughter of Sir Richard Empson. He died in 1503, leaving a nine-month-old daughter Jane. Anne, who married as her second husband John Hugford, kept some interest in Waterperry, perhaps only the third which she and her husband conveyed in 1515 to the Bishop of Norwich and others. Anne's daughter Jane had by 1517 married Humphrey Tyrrell of Ockendon (Essex), and a year after his death in 1549 she sold all her estates to her son George Tyrrell.He is said to have 'impaired the family estate very much and squandered away several manors'. He sold his Waterperry property in 1562 to Thomas Tipping of Shabbington (Bucks.), who resold almost at once to Vincent Curson, who already held the rest of the original manor, which had comprised the Beaufeu fee.

The Cursons, who came from an old Derbyshire family, were to hold the manor for 200 years and to make it one of the centres of Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire. Walter Curson or. Curzon, the third son of John Curzon of Kedleston (Derb.), was acquiring land in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire early in the 16th century. In 1523 he leased the Beaufeu manor in Waterperry and in 1526 bought half of Carbonel manor in Addington (Bucks.). He died in 1527, and he and his wife Isabel, the daughter of Edward Sanders of Harrington (Northants.), were buried in the church of the Austin Friars in Oxford, of which he was a benefactor. Their fine brass was 'piously removed' at the Dissolution to the church of Waterperry, of which they were also benefactors and where they were already commemorated in a window. Their son Richard added to the family's property by buying Addington manor in 1532. He died in 1549, and it may be his mutilated brass that is now in the lord's aisle in Waterperry church. The Cursons, who were evidently now living at Waterperry, seem to have encroached on the Tyrrells' rights there for Richard's son Vincent, who only came of age in 1552, and his mother Agnes were about this time at law with Jane Tyrrell over Waterperry. Vincent Curson lived until 1580. He was succeeded by his son Sir Francis, who died in 1610, and then by his grandson, Sir John. Sir John later seems to have been in financial difficulties, probably because of fines for recusancy, for in 1628 he sold the Addington estate. He was a royalist, and was early involved in preparations for the Civil War; he was arrested while fleeing from Watlington, where he had been trying to seize the magazine, and was sent to the Tower by Hampden in August 1642. A few weeks later he petitioned for his release on account of age and because his estate was suffering 'much from his absence'.

Sir John was succeeded in 1655 by his third son Thomas, the two elder being already dead. He was made a baronet in 1661, and died in 1682, being followed by his son, Sir John Curson. He married successively two Roman Catholics, Penelope, daughter and coheir of William Child of Worcestershire, and Anne, sister and coheir of Rowland, Baron Dormer (d. 1712), and widow of Edmund Powell of Sandford. According to Anthony Wood, he became a Roman Catholic soon after his first marriage, and Hearne described him as 'a man that was a Roman Catholic, but of great goodness'. It was he who rebuilt the manor-house. He died in 1727 and the estate passed to his son, Sir Francis, who was said to have been apprenticed to a London merchant in 1693, at that time probably being a younger son. He died childless in 1750, his only son having died at the age of fourteen. In his will he made elaborate provisions for the descent of the property; he was succeeded in the title by his brother, Sir Peter, a Jesuit priest, the last of the Curson male line, but his property was held by his wife Winifred, the daughter and coheir of John Powell of Sandford, until her death in 1764. It then went to Sir Francis's niece, Catherine Brinkhurst, who took the name of Curson and died unmarried in 1776, and then to John Barnwall, the son of her sister, Frances Cussack, by a first marriage. He took the name of Curson, and also died unmarried in 1787. By this time all the legatees mentioned in Sir John Curson's will were dead, and John Barnwall Curson left it by will to his halfcousin once removed, Francis Henry Roper. Roper had no Curson blood, but he took the name and arms of Curson in compliance with the terms of his inheritance. In 1824 he succeeded to the peerage as 14th Baron Teynham. He was a confirmed gambler and his losses obliged him to alienate all the Curson estates. In 1815 he sold Waterperry for £100,000 to Joseph Henley, ) a successful London merchant, whose grandfather Francis Henley is said to have come to London from County Cork and become a Thames waterman.

Joseph Henley lived until 1832, and his son, Joseph Warner Henley, who came to live in Waterperry soon after his marriage in 1817 to Georgina Fane, daughter of John Fane, M.P., of Wormsley, was prominent in national and local affairs. His son Joseph John Henley, who succeeded him in 1884, was also a prominent public servant. Dying in 1910, he was succeeded by his grandson Captain J. C. W. Henley, R.N., who sold the Waterperry estate to Magdalen College in 1925. Waterperry House was bought in 1949 by the tenant, Miss B. Havergall, the principal, with Miss A. J Sanders, of a residential horticultural college for women.

An estate in THOMLEY assessed at 4½ hides, was held in 1086 by Hervey of the Bishop of Bayeux, and later became part of the honor of Pontefract. Another estate there, assessed at half a hide, was held by Roger of Miles Crispin. By the end of the 12th century the lords of Thomley were living in the Oxfordshire village from which they had taken their name; they were a prominent local family and were benefactors to several of the religious houses in the county. The first known member of the family, Godfrey, had two sons, Jordan and Rualdus. Jordan, the elder, whose wife was probably Basile, gave a hide of land to the abbey of Stratford Langthorn (Essex), and was dead by about 1180–90, when his son Henry confirmed the grant. Henry had two wives, the second of whom was Adeliza Ghernon, and was dead by about 1213. He was succeeded by his son Robert de Thomley, who also had two wives, Denise and Aufricia, and who granted or sold land to Oseney, St. Frideswide's, and the Sandford preceptory of the Templars. He was holding Thomley in 1242–3,but by 1254 had been succeeded by his son Ellis, whose wife was named Joan, and who was alive in 1265. By 1279 Robert de Thomley, probably the son of Ellis, was lord of Thomley, but by that time the family's land had diminished to a single virgate. Robert was succeeded by John de Thomley, who, with the abbots of Oseney and Dorchester, was lord of Thomley in 1316. He had been a juror as early as about 1300, and was dead by 1334, when another John de Thomley, a minor, was holding Thomley. He came of age in 1344, but by that time the family seems to have left the manor, for he is called quondam dominus de Thomley. After this, track is lost of the family.

The lands of the manor had been so much dispersed, that it is likely that no clear-cut manorial rights remained. After the Reformation the various properties were again united under one ownership and followed the descent of Worminghall manor. In 1911 Thomley, still called a manor, was sold on the break-up of the Worminghall estate, (fn. 167) and is now owned by Exeter College.

The gardens date back to 1932 when Miss Beatrix Havergal opened her School of Horticulture for Ladies. The 8 acre ornamental gardens include a rose and formal knot garden, water-lily canal, riverside walk, and one of the finest purely herbaceous borders in the country. Herbaceous nursery stock beds provide a living catalogue of plants, and there's also an alpine garden, and the National Collection of Kabschia Saxifrages. A commercial plant centre, stocked with plants grown in on-site nurseries, occupies large areas of the beautiful walled garden, and the site also boasts a 5 acres of commercial orchards, producing the famous Waterperry apple juice each year. Gardening courses are held throughout the year.