posted 09-06-2000 10:41 AM
******OWLPEN HISTORY CONTINUED ********Daunt family (1462-1815)
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Margery de Olepenne married John Daunt, a member of a merchant family established in Wotton-under-Edge since the time of Edward II. Earlier in the century, Nicholas Daunt had married Alice, daughter of Sir William de Tracy, ancestor of the lords Sudeley of Toddington. John's father, also John, born about 1420, was a Lancastrian, a lawyer at Barnard's Inn in Holborn in 1446, and elected to the Parliament of 1449-50 for the borough of Wotton Bassett, by which time he had perhaps entered the service of the Crown. He married Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Stawell, ancestor of the lords Stawell of Somerton. In 1451 he was appointed Keeper of the Royal Park at Mere in Wiltshire, and the following year he was promoted from King's Sergeant and Groom to the position of Yeoman of the Crown, with a salary of sixpence a day from the issues of Wiltshire. In 1462, in the worst days after Towton, a commission was issued for the arrest of Daunt and others, including the vicar of Mere, "evil-disposed persons, and adherents to Henry VI".
In April 1471, the outside world for once brushes against Owlpen. Edward, Prince of Wales, the Lancastrian heir, wrote from Weymouth to John Daunt the elder, asking him to raise "fellowship" and money from Mere and Purton for the Lancastrian campaign:
att our landinge wee have knowledge that Edward Earle of March the Kings greate rebell our Enemy approcheth him in Armes towards the Kinges highnes whiche Edward wee purpose with Gods grace to encounter in all haste possible.
The letter, long preserved at the manor, is lost, but is quoted by Samuel Rudder (of Uley) in 1779.
A tradition in the Daunt and Stoughton families records that Margaret of Anjou, the ardent queen of Henry VI, spent the night of May 2 1471, en route to the fateful battle of Tewkesbury, here. John the younger was doubtless as loyal a Lancastrian as his father, and would have been proud to welcome the royal guest to his manor at Owlpen. Queen Margaret is said to walk in the Great Chamber, a "grey lady" wearing a fur-trimmed gown and wimple - a quiet and apparently benevolent ghost (and one of at least three ghosts recorded in the house).
John and Margery Daunt were richer than the de Olepennes had ever been. In the early sixteenth century their son, Christopher (owner 1522-1542) or, more likely, their grandson Thomas I (owner 1542-74) was able to build, or rebuild, the centre block containing the present Hall and Great Chamber. The alliance of the families is marked by the mid-sixteenth-century heraldic wallpainting showing the arms of Daunt quartering de Olepenne on the north wall of the Hall and, in stone outside, over the hood-mould of the first floor window. Christopher married a Basset of Uley; Thomas, more politic, married Alice, daughter of William Throckmorton of Tortworth.
The marriage was advantageous: the fortunes of the Throckmortons, also Lancastrians and a cadet branch of those seated at Coughton Court, Warwickshire (now owned by the National Trust), were rising, with a succession of knighthoods, the patronage at Court of the earl of Leicester and a baronetcy by 1611. Thomas I entailed the Owlpen and Gloucestershire estates (some 945 acres in total at this time) on his male heirs, which was the unknowing cause of a disastrous family feud in the next generation.
Thomas I and Alice left five sons. Thomas II and William, their second and third sons, settled in Ireland as planters in Munster. Thomas II acquired large estates in County Cork, at Tracton Abbey and, in 1595, at Gortigrenane; the latter comprised (by 1638) "one castle, 100 messuages, 200 cottages, 200 tofts, 200 gardens, 4 mills and 1,000 acres of land". He was uprooted by the Munster rebellion in 1598 and met with constant difficulties, but was ultimately to consolidate his Irish estates with success.
The fourth son, Giles, of Newark Park, Ozleworth (now also owned by the National Trust), was a keen hunter (and notorious poacher), described by the historian of the Berkeleys, John Smyth, in 1608 as one of "nine men of metal, and good wood-men (I mean old notorious deer-stalkers) armed with nets and dogs" who raided the Berkeley woods and whose detection became a cause célèbre. He told Smyth of himself and George Huntley of Boxwell, that "their slaughter of foxes in Ozleworth have byn 231 in one yeare".
Meanwhile Henry, the eldest son of Thomas I and Alice, had inherited the Owlpen estate. Alice died in 1599, her epitaph stating: "viginti sex annos vera vidua vixit" [26 years she lived a true widow]. Henry died in 1590, leaving a son Giles to succeed him, and a daughter Frances. But Giles died in 1596 without issue, and Frances was now married to John Bridgman, an ambitious young barrister of little personal charm. Bridgman claimed possession of the estate in right of his wife against her uncle Thomas II, and occupied the house as next-of-kin. Bridgman's claim was supported by the influential Sir Thomas Throckmorton, described (by Smyth) as a "powerfull and plottinge gent … who both made the maryage, and abetted the title".
The ousted Thomas II returned from Ireland to defend his inheritance, pursuing his claim on the grounds that the estate was entailed to heirs male, to the Star Chamber. It took him twelve years to secure a favourable verdict, making discovery of "plots and practices". But Bridgman had secured the manor of Nympsfield and later purchased Prinknash Park, near Gloucester, as well. There was a magnificent fireplace at Prinknash until the 1920s bearing the Daunt/de Olepenne coat of arms, now in an American museum. Bridgman was later knighted and became Recorder of Gloucester and Chief Justice of Chester. He is now preserved in marble effigy beside Alice in Ludlow Church, Shropshire. He was a harsh judge and the Ludlow locals composed for themselves a scornful epitaph: "Here lies Sir John Bridgeman clad in his clay / God said to the devil, Sirrah, take him away."
Thomas II had to pay compensation, but it was obviously not crippling: perhaps revenues were beginning to come in from Ireland. At any rate, in 1616 he rebuilt Owlpen's old solar wing to the west, adding a new storied bay window in ashlar with a datestone and his initials. There was some re-arrangement of the internal accommodation, hearths and chimneys, details and dressings to the gables-with their distinctive owl finials-and fenestration; he probably incorporated the old outhouses in a new kitchen block. His work represents the last major change to the fabric of the manor, so that its appearance today remains much as he left it, a house which has grown by slow accretions from 1450 to 1616 and where Thomas II's early seventeenth-century work still predominates. The Court House was built as a banqueting house, representing the same phase of works.
When Thomas II died, on August 20 1621, he could look back on much solid achievement. The Daunts were established as landowners in two countries and, though the early death of his Oxford-educated eldest son, Achilles (the first of the family to use that name), was a sorrow, he had other male heirs. His next son Thomas III (died 1669) inherited Owlpen and Gortigrenane. The other Irish estate, Tracton Abbey, went to the line of Thomas I's third son, William Daunt, and from him a clan of Daunts, carrying the name Achilles or William, colonized the broad southern strip of Cork from Youghal to the Kerry border.
The Daunt principal landed interests, like many of their marriages, were now firmly in Ireland; there, according to John Smyth in 1639, they chiefly resided, so that Owlpen became a mainland base, a secondary estate which an elder son would administer, while the paterfamilias reigned in Ireland. There they joined the ranks of the Anglo-Irish 'Ascendancy' and the family by now had some pretensions to gentility: Thomas III was fined in 1630 for not taking up the order of knighthood. Surviving lists of books, in a Catalogus librorum of 1639, in Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, French and Italian, indicate men of learning.
The seventeenth-century Daunts begin to emerge as personalities, coming alive through a Civil War correspondence for the years 1646 and 1650 preserved between Thomas III in Ireland (where he was High Sheriff of county Cork in 1645) and his eldest son, Thomas IV (1619-1653) at Owlpen. Thomas IV is revealed as an ardent Parliamentarian, jubilant at Fairfax's successes against the "Cabbs", and confident that "if God send peace, all will doe well, for the Impartiall Judgement of parliament will confirme right to all." He writes blow by blow commentaries, mostly culled from his "diurnals", on the progress of the Parliamentary cause. Interspersed with these are cryptic requests for his father to act in important and confidential business, requiring his presence and money. He asks for "a barrel of pickled Samphier and some scallop shells", complains that the cattle are poor, that he has not received his share of a legacy and that only half his library has been sent over from Ireland. He is seen lobbying the Gloucestershire Committee, which included, in January 1646, "Mr Carew Rawleigh, sonne to Sir Walter Rawleigh…Sir Gyles Overbury…and Mr Herbert, who wrote the booke of travaile, a gentleman which understands Arabicke and Persian" (and Charles I's future biographer), all of whom were expected to be friendly to the Daunts. Thomas IV married the daughter of Sir Gabriel Lowe of Newark Park, but he died before his father and never inherited.
Achilles Daunt (1622-1706) inherited in 1669. He was unmarried and took little part in affairs. Their politics did not prosper the Daunts at the Restoration. Achilles was attainted as a rebel and a traitor by James II's Irish Parliament in 1689. He was in England at the time and so avoided trouble, although the old castle at Gortigrenane seems to have been burnt down at this time. The Protestant streak was strong, but he was too old to profit from supporting William III. Besides, the Owlpen property was no longer such as to make its owner important: the estate had been eclipsed in size by its neighbours, the house was inconvenient.
After Achilles died in 1706, the house was hardly occupied for fourteen years. Then, in 1719, Thomas V (1676-1748/9), Achilles' nephew and heir, came over from Ireland after his aunt's death to collect the Lady Day rents, and with intent to build. We see his work as the final building phase, classicizing and symmetricizing details of the old house, making small improvements to its comforts, installing five sash windows and the bolection-moulded fireplaces, panelling the Georgian rooms, raising ceilings, reordering the gardens with their yews and terraces, the gate piers and a palisade, rebuilding the grist mill, the great barn and, finally, the church. All the expenditure is carefully recorded in his surviving account books. Externally his funds allowed him only to reface the façade of the east wing; internally it was a remodelling rather than a reconstruction. His recorded works about the estate continue actively to 1739; he died ten years later, having raised what was to prove the last family (of seven children) in the house until recent times. His monument in Owlpen Church describes him as "truly pious, strictly just, and zealously loyal to King and Country".
Two bachelors, Thomas VI (1701-1777) and his younger brother Kingscote Daunt (1723-58), set up house together after their father's death. Kingscote was a contemporary at Pembroke College, Oxford, of the lawyer Sir William Blackstone and of others whom he proudly lists among those with whom he was on terms of friendship. He officiated as curate of Owlpen (and Wickwar), while his letters show him taking the Bath waters for his ill health and searching for a better living through connections at Oxford and in Ireland.
The estate then passed to Thomas VII (1755-1803) who had already inherited Gortigrenane from his father Achilles, Thomas VI's twin brother. The house had entered its long period of neglect. He took little interest in Gloucestershire. A surviving notice shows that the last Daunts were contemplating selling the estate with 355 acres:
the estate in hand for living & for farm rent…besides the Mannor House out houses & gardens, a grist mill, some cottages, about 200 akers of well grown wood, situated in a most healthie countrey…any purchaser that will be informed in particulars, himself, his letter or messenger will be kindlie received at Owlpen…by Tho. Daunt.
He kept a carriage and a chaise at Owlpen, which he used as a convenient base for visits to Bath. His accounts from Bath tailors and hairdressers show him as fastidious, buying a "fashionable stripe scarlet Waistcoat", bows for his boots and shoes, "pound powder and rolers" for his hair, materials in cassimere, marseil[les], shalloon and flannel; and a pair of sidelock pistols from John Richards in the Strand. Thomas VII was believed locally to have been a magician. After his death, the sealed room in which his books and papers had been kept for many years, was said to be haunted. They were thought so dangerous that parson Cornwall was sent for to destroy them and "as they were burning, birds flew out of them". He was to be the last of the Daunts for, on his death in 1803, the male line again failed as it had done 300 years before. By 1807, T.D. Fosbrooke was describing the house as half dilapidated and overrun with ivy.
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