The Manor of Nuthurst
The manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey share a common thread: each passed through royal or monastic hands before reaching Squire ‘Gumley’ Wilson. Nuthurst followed a different path - never a royal manor, never a monastic estate, its story is that of a single Warwickshire family and their park, passing down from generation to generation.
The name of Nuthurst is found long before the Domesday Book was written. Hnuthyrst in Old English, meaning the nut wood, was first mentioned in the year 709, when Coenred, King of Mercia, gave the woodland to Worcester Cathedral. In 872 the Bishop of Worcester granted it to Eanwulf, a servant of the king. Like Hampton-in-Arden, it was part of the d’Aubigny inheritance that passed into the hands of Roger de Mowbray.
Nuthurst became a separate Lordship, held around 1230 by Robert Hasting. By 1272 the lordship had passed to William Trussell of Flores, an adviser to King Edward I. The Trussells were a Warwickshire family of some consequence, their arms recorded in the Powell Roll of 1347 or 1348 in two branches: Sir John Trussell of Kibblestone bearing Argent fretty Gules bezantée, and Theobald Trussell of Flores bearing Argent a cross flory Gules.
It was William Trussell’s son, Sir William Trussell of Nuthurst, who gave the family its most dramatic moment. Appointed Speaker of the House of Commons and acting as procurator of the whole Parliament, he renounced allegiance to Edward II on 21st January 1327 - an act of constitutional theatre performed before a king held captive at Kenilworth, barely thirty miles from the Nuthurst estate. No English king had previously been addressed in quite this way. Speaking not as an individual lord but as procurator for the whole realm, Trussell declared that the bond of allegiance between king and people had been dissolved. Edward III was crowned eleven days later, and Trussell went on to serve the new king as Secretary and diplomat. The Lord of Nuthurst had helped unmake one king and establish another.
The Trussells built a manor house on the estate, and in 1331 enclosed a park beside it - a bank and palisade containing deer, wild boar and rabbit, where the family and their guests could hawk and hunt. The licence to empark was more than permission to fence woodland. Medieval parks were symbols of lordship, requiring royal authority and considerable wealth. It was the kind of investment that spoke of confidence in the future. That confidence proved well founded. The Trussells of Billesley held Nuthurst for nearly four hundred years, one of the longer continuous lordships in the county.
The 1619 Visitation of Warwickshire records the Billesley branch of the family quartering both sets of arms, Trussell quartering Trussell, with Flores in the first and fourth quarters. The visitation traces a lineage of eight generations from Sir Alured Trussell, who married Katherine, daughter and heiress of William Trussell of ‘We.’ (prob. Welton, Northants.). The line of descendants, however, was from his second wife.
Trussell of Billesley
Arms: Quarterly 1st and 4th: Argent a cross flory Gules, 2nd and 3rd: Argent fretty Gules on each joint a bezant
Twenty years later, in 1640, Edward Trussell sold the Manor of Nuthurst to William Jesson. With the Jessons the manor entered a new age. Nuthurst was no longer the seat of a knightly lineage. A wealthy dyer of Coventry, Jesson had made his fortune in trade rather than tenure, and his career traced the arc of a prosperous urban merchant drawn into the machinery of civic and national government. He was admitted to Coventry’s council in 1628, became Mayor in 1631, and sat in the House of Commons between 1640 and 1648, witnessing England’s descent into civil war and the overthrow of another king. His eldest son William was MP for Coventry in 1660, and his grandson became Sir William Jesson of Burleigh Hall in Loughborough.
The Jessons held Nuthurst for about a century. Pudsey Jesson sold the lordship sometime before 1745 to Benjamin Palmer, from whom it was eventually inherited by Squire ‘Gumley’ Wilson. By 1843 Wilson is named as joint landowner with Henry Bowen of three small parcels in Nuthurst, each with buildings and occupied by tenants - the landholdings of the Lord of the Manor reduced from park and hunting ground to a handful of rented plots. Little remained of the nut wood that Coenred had given to Worcester Cathedral eleven centuries before.
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