Historic Description of Greys Court

Greys Court

This, like Broughton and Shirburn, is a fourteenth century castle, but unlike them, is not water-girt, but situated on a knoll overlooking the narrow and picturesque valley of the Rother brook, an outlying corner of the highlands of Chiltern. The castle, and the branch of the prolific family of Grey which built it, hand held it for the first years of its existence, start from a churchman, Walter de Grey, Archbishop of York (obit 1255), who bought the manor and left it to his nephew, Sir John de Grey, a favourite of Edward III, and one of his original Knights of the Garter, whose banner – barry azure and argent a bend gules – may still be seen hanging in St George’s hall at Windsor. He got his “licence to crenellate” in 1348, and built a rectangular castle with octagonal or square corner towers, of which three survive today, but the fourth has disappeared, as has most of the connecting curtain wall between them. The space inside is much cut up with modern garden enclosures, and the general aspect of the ruins is rather puzzling, from their want of coherence. Only the wall between the north-east and south-east towers is continuous. The material of the towers is flint and brick mixed – a curious blend in the way of colour: the bricks are very thin, even for the fourteenth century work, and sometimes laid in herringbone fashion as in the earliest Norman style. The north-east tower is larger than the other two survivors: against the south-west one a small modern [seventeenth century?] residence has been built, little better than a cottage.

The last de Grey died in 1387: his daughter and sole heiress, Joanna, married John Lord D’Eyncourt, but had no male issue by him. Her child, another heiress, Alice D’Eyncourt, took Rotherfield and many other possessions to her husband, William Lord Lovell, already a great magnate in Oxfordshire. Alice’s grandson, Francis Lord Lovell, was that resolute and unscrupulous supporter of Richard III, who has achieved immortality, along with Catesby and Ratcliffe, in the famous lines about “the cat, the rat, and Lovell the dog” who “ruled all England under the hog.” He was attained after Bosworth Field, and all his wide lands distributed among Lancastrians; Rotherfield Castle fell to Henry Tudor’s aged uncle, Jasper of Pembroke. It went back to the crown on his death, childless, and after several other changes was granted to Francis Knowles, a relative of Queen Elizabeth I. He was her Treasurer for many years, and his son William Knollys of Rotherfield Greys, and afterwards Earl of Banbury. Their heavy Jacobean monument is conspicuous in the village church. Earl William is remembered for two unhappy reasons. He was made, by James I, the gaoler of the wicked Earl and Countess of Somerset, the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. After their release from the Tower, he had unwillingly to lodge them for two years at Rotherfield, (Somerset and his wife are said to have conceived such a distaste for each other’s company that they refused to speak to each other, and were confined, at their own request, in two separate towers at Rotherfield. When they were allowed in 1623, to choose separate places of internment they parted forever.) He probably owed this invidious duty to the fact that his young second wife was the elder sister of the infamous countess. That this lady herself was not an estimable character, may be sufficiently gathered from the fact that when Knollys died, at the age of 86, the House of Lords refused to recognize as his heirs the two sons who had been borne by Lady Banbury a few years before, when her husband had sunk into his dotage. The lawsuits resulting from this decision lasted intermittently for a hundred and fifty years, only to come to an end in the reign of George III, and form the longest record in all “Peerage Cases.”

Rotherfield Castle was completely gutted at the end of the Civil Wars of 1642-46 – having been held as a royalist garrison much incommoding the Parliamentarians at Henley and Reading. No attempt was made to restore any portion of it, but a new house was built just outside the old precincts in the time of Charles II, and was occupied by Stapletons down to quite recent days. It has been much modernized and only part of it has a seventeenth century appearance. It looks out, across a lawn, on to the picturesque ruins of two of the ancient towers of John de Grey.

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