Chastleton

Chastleton House was created by an unidentified builder between 1607 and 1612 for the lawyer Walter Jones. The design reflects the fashion of the time for tall, compact outward-looking houses. The south front of Chastleton is a superb example of Jacobean architecture with its advancing and receding planes of staircase towers and flanking bays, its counterpoint of differing window levels and its increasing ratio of glass to wall at the centre of the house. Inside, the decoration of the Great Chamber is the most lavish in the house with ornate panelling, a complex frieze and a ceiling moulded in high relief. The Jones family became increasingly impoverished after the Civil War; their genteel poverty served to protect the house from change, and their deep attachment to it ensured it stayed in the family until 1991 when it passed to the National Trust.

Chastleton House, Oxfordshire

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A collection of tapestries, furniture such as the refectory table, leather chests and the blue and red flamestitch hangings lining a little closet are identifiable on the inventory taken after the owner's death in 1632 (Walter Jones, who bought the estate from Robert Catesby in 1602). There are also a number of rare 17th century woollen hangings. There is a small country squires' library, rich in ordinary books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; roughly 400 books printed before 1801. Many books are fragile.

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