The Court, The Croft
The Court dates from the seventeenth century and was just a three-bedroomed cottage until the late 1920s, when it was remodelled. It still has seventeenth-century leaded cross-casement windows and end stacks.
This house was originally part of the Manor of Heddington attached to Headington House. In the nineteenth century was owned by the Latimers, Charles Tawney, and then the Wootten-Woottens, and was rented out.
The Wilkins family were already renting the Court by the time of the 1841 census and remained there until 1901. The Headington Rate Book of 1850 shows that William Wilkins rented the house from Charles Tawney of Headington Lodge: its rateable value was then £20, and the gross estimated rental £24. Wilkins was a butcher and dealer, who also rented 24 acres of land from Miss Latimer in the meadows to the north of the house.
At the time of the 1861 census, Wilkins (a butcher and grazier employing one man and two boys) and his wife Ann had six daughters and just one son: they lived in the Court (which is not named, but described as being "Near the Pound") with one servant. In the 1881 census, when he was a widower of 76 but still described as a farmer and butcher, he was still living in the Court in partnership with his 26-year-old son, William Robert Loder Wilkins (a butcher and farmer of 30 acres, employing one man and two boys). Also living in the house with no occupation were his four unmarried daughters: Mary Claudine (30), Rose Fanny (28), Laura Elizabeth (24), and Minnie Angelina (22). In the 1890s the Misses Laura and Minnie Wilkins ran the farm as a dairy and sold butter and milk to the people of Old Headington.
From 1901 to 1909 the Woottens' coachman, Joseph Hicks, lived in the Court with his family. When the Wootten estate was sold in 1914, Within Living Memory states that Miss Gertrude Drage bought the house, and that subsequently Mrs Dowdenay lived there, but there is no listing at this time in directories.
From 1925 into the 1930s, Lord Sholto Douglas, a bachelor who called himself "the last of the Stuarts", is listed as living at the Court: he remodelled the house extensively and added a Roman Catholic chapel, which is now a bedroom.
Mr R. Snow lived there from the 1930s, and Harry Richardson Creswick, Bodley’s Library in the 1940s. In 1948 Gabriel Turville-Petre, the Vigfussen Professor of Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities moved in, and his widow was still there in the 1980s.
Listed Building reference: Court: 1485/40; Wall to Croft/Laurel Farm Close: 1485/40A