Chastleton House

Summary

A Grade I listed Jacobean country house near Moreton-in-Marsh in Oxfordshire, owned by the National Trust, remarkable for having remained in the same family for nearly four hundred years and for the Trust’s policy of conservation over restoration, used as the fictional Wolf Hall itself in the BBC Two series Wolf Hall (2015) and as Boot Magna Hall in the ITV adaptation of Scoop (1987).

About this location

Chastleton House stands at Chastleton in the north Oxfordshire Cotswolds, close to Moreton-in-Marsh and the county boundary with Gloucestershire. It was built between 1607 and 1612, possibly to a design by Robert Smythson, for Walter Jones — who had made his fortune from the law but whose family were originally Welsh wool merchants. Jones bought the site in 1602 from Robert Catesby, one of the principal organizers of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, whose house was demolished to make way for the new building. The house is built of golden Cotswold stone around a small internal courtyard.

Chastleton is unusual among houses of its era in several respects. It was never provided with a long, landscaped park approach; instead it was built within the existing village, which provided laundry, fishpond, and bakehouse services. More unusually still, it remained in the ownership of the same family — the Joneses and their descendants — for nearly four hundred years until its acquisition by the National Trust in 1991. The family’s declining fortunes from the 18th century onwards meant the house received very little modernisation, preserving an extraordinary accumulation of original fabric and furnishings. The Trust’s conservation approach treats “controlled decay” as preferable to restoration, allowing visitors to see the house as it was acquired.

The Long Gallery has a 72-foot rel-vaulted ceiling. The Great Chamber contains a sophisticated scheme of Renaissance-influenced panelling with painted roundels depicting Old Testament prophets and Classical sibyls. The house also contains a collection of Jacobite “fiat” glasses engraved with Jacobite emblems, revealing the family’s 18th-century sympathies.

Scoop (ITV, 1987, adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel, directed by Gavin Millar) used Chastleton as Boot Magna Hall, the ancestral estate of the Boot family. Wolf Hall (BBC Two, 2015, directed by Peter Kosminsky, written by Peter Straughan after Hilary Mantel’s novels, starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII) used Chastleton House to represent Wolf Hall itself — the Wiltshire home of the Seymour family, from which the series takes its title.