Listed Building History: 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. In the nineteenth century it was owned by the Latimer family of Headington House, then by Charles Tawney of Headington Lodge, and finally by Wootten-Wootten family of Headington House. All three owners rented it 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 (who came from Shipton in Gloucestershire) then rented the house from Charles Tawney, and that its rateable value was then £20 and its gross estimated rental £24. Wilkins was a butcher and dealer who also rented 24 acres of meadow to the north of the house from Miss Latimer.
At the time of the 1861 census, Wilkins (a butcher and grazier employing one man and two boys) can be seen living at The Court (not named, but described as being “Near the Pound”) with his wife Anne and six daughters one son, and a servant. By the time of the 1881 census, Wilkins was a widower, 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), and his four unmarried daughters: Mary Claudine (30), Rose Fanny (28), Laura Elizabeth (24), and Minnie Angelina (22). By 1891 only William Wilkins (79) and three of his daughters were in the house (Mary (34), who was a ladies’ companion, Minnie (26), and Laura (22)).
William Wilkins died at the age of 80, and was buried at Headington Cemetery on 19 December 1893. According to Within Living Memory, 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 Wootten-Woottens, who still owned The Court, used it to house their coachman, Joseph Hicks, who came from Woolstone in Berkshire. The census that year shows the Hicks family in residence: Joseph (47), his wife Mary (41) and their three children: Norah (17) was working as a housemaid, Ephraim (15) as a groom, and Dorothy (4) was at school. Another groom and probably a relation, Horace Hicks (21) was boarding with them.
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
