Court Place, 33 Oxford Road, Old Marston
Photographed on 4 March 2006
Court Place is Grade II listed (ref. 1485/148). This former farmhouse dates from the early sixteenth century, and it was enlarged in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, and remodelled in about 1880. It is built of limestone rubble on a T-plan.
On 12 March 1483 (Bridgwater Deed 115) Hugh Shurley of Sandford and John Brireton of Abingdon enfeoffed William Hye of Marston and his wife Elizabeth in a messuage and virgate of land in Marston called "le Courtplace" and a water-mill (all of which they lately had of the feoffment of William Haye).
The farm was owned by Brasenose College from about 1500 to 1956, and a manorial court was held in the house. Important documents were signed "at the Court Place" in Marston at the time of the Wars of the Roses.
At the time of the 1881 census the farmhouse was occupied by Henry W. Boughton, an unmarried man of 30, described as a farmer of 160 acres employing five men, three women, and two boys. He was born in Stanton St John, and was living in this farmhouse with his widowed mother, Fanny Boughton, and his 13-year-old London-born niece, Alice Wymark. He was still listed in directories as a farmer here in 1913, but the 1901 census shows a different family living in the house: George Cross (35), a farmer and dairyman, with wife Clara and their four children: George (9), Clara (7), Aubrey (5), and Ernest (2).
Some other occupants:
1935, 1943: Charles R. Broughton, farmer
1947: John West was a dairy farmer at both Court Place and Grange farms
1958: Hugh Cardwell, D.Phil.