Moated Halls
In 1832 a private Act of Parliament resolved the terms of Ben Palmer’s entail. The estates were to be divided with the Wilson family taking Knowle and the Wigley line taking Malvern Hall under the separate provisions of Henry Greswolde Lewis’s will. Before the division, the Palmer Estate of Knowle, Olton and Milverton, “with some outlying lands of small extent”, to quote the Squire, was undivided between Gumley Wilson and Colonel Edmund Meysey Wigley. They were like brothers.
The Greswolde surname and arms had been granted in a Royal Licence by King William IV: in August 1829 Edmund Meysey Wigley had assumed them by the King’s authority, in compliance with a proviso in Lewis’s will, and was named Edmund Meysey-Wigley-Greswolde at the time of his death. He had inherited a life interest in Malvern Hall, but died unmarried in January 1833. Caroline Meysey-Wigley, Edmund’s sister and co-heiress, inherited Olton Hall, with Gumley Wilson retaining Knowle and the manors. The Greswolde name and arms went to Colonel Greswolde’s uncle Henry Wigley, granted to him and his four children by Royal Licence in February 1833.
In accordance with Lewis’s will, the newly named Henry Wigley-Greswolde succeeded his nephew as tenant for life of Malvern Hall. He and his son Edmund, recognising that Malvern Hall would otherwise pass to the Wilson family under the terms of Lewis’s will, moved quickly to break that entail. An entail bound an estate to a specific line of descent, preventing it from being sold or diverted. Breaking it required the agreement of both the tenant for life and the next male heir specified in the will. Together they had the power to bar all other interests, including Wilson’s, without his consent. The Fines and Recoveries Act 1833, passed that same year, would simplify the process for others, replacing the old cumbersome court proceedings with a straightforward disentailing deed - one of several Victorian reforms that made it easier to free land from dynastic constraints. Henry and his son Edmund conveyed the estates to their own use and removed Wilson from the succession. Edmund died just three years later and Malvern Hall passed back to his father. When Henry Wigley-Greswolde died in 1849, the Malvern estate was divided among his daughters. The Greswolde name had once again failed to find a male heir.
Ann Greswolde, Henry’s daughter, had married Francis Edward Williams in 1838. Henry Wigley-Greswolde had settled a third of the estates on their marriage. The remaining shares passed through daughters and younger sons across the following decades, consolidating eventually in John Francis Williams, who in January 1876 was granted a Royal Licence by Queen Victoria to take the surname and arms of Greswolde before his own, in compliance with a condition in the will of his aunt Mary Greswolde - the Royal Concession recorded at the College of Arms. He became John Francis Greswolde-Williams, and by the time of his death in 1892 held property in thirteen counties. He was described as the wealthiest commoner in England. His estates included Malvern Hall itself, with its 148 acres of ornamental grounds and deer park, a magnificent avenue half a mile in length and an ornamental lake formed by the River Blythe. The Greswolde name had survived, through daughters, legal instruments and Royal Licences, where the male line had not.
Between Malvern Hall and Knowle Hall lay Longdon Hall, whose mistress was Lady Byron. Anne Isabella Milbanke (1792-1860) had married the poet Lord Byron in January 1815 and separated from him barely a year later. Her family had held the Manor of Longdon since the seventeenth century, and she retained it through the separation, living in its landscape and devoting herself to educational reform and the abolitionist cause, and to the raising of her daughter Ada, who became a mathematician and is now regarded as the first computer programmer. As tenants occupied Longdon Hall itself, Lady Byron frequently stayed at The Mermaid coaching inn on the Warwick turnpike - the inn that Henry Greswolde Lewis had renamed and rebuilt, and which is now known as the Greswolde Arms.
Caroline Meysey-Wigley, living at nearby Olton Hall, met Lady Byron at an inn in Knowle and saw “a pale grey woman”. She later recorded thinking about the “vehement passions” and the “fiery nature” of the poet she had kissed, while her husband Rev. Archer Clive longed to ask why they had quarrelled. Publishing under the pseudonym V, Caroline Clive was among the most admired writers of her generation. Her novel Paul Ferroll (1855) is considered a forerunner of the Victorian sensation novel. She also wrote John Greswold (1864), a novel drawn from the family history she had grown up with. She died in July 1873 when a spark from the fire caught her dress as she sat among her papers at Whitfield in Herefordshire. She was 72 years old and a confirmed invalid, unable to reach the bell in time. Gumley Wilson described Caroline as a cripple “in irons as to her legs”, said she was “very well read, very clever, and a very charming companion” and that she “rode about all over the country”, “used to get awful falls now and then” but “her pluck was indomitable.”
This landscape retained much of its medieval character. Moated halls had been common in the Forest of Arden since the thirteenth century - status symbols as much as defensive structures. The de Malverne family had a moated site opposite Marsh Lane, close to where Malvern Hall would later stand. Hobs Moat, barely two miles north and close by Olton Hall, marked the site of the de Odingsell manor house, abandoned for centuries but its earthwork still present. Ancient woodland, mill streams and the remnants of medieval settlements lay between the halls and the farms, largely unchanged. J. R. R. Tolkien grew up in Sarehole, now part of Hall Green, in this same landscape. He described the area as a kind of lost paradise, and drew on its rural character for the Shire.
The River Blythe runs through this landscape, past the parkland of Malvern Hall and the grounds of Knowle Hall, curving around the boundaries of Barston, Hampton-in-Arden and Diddington before flowing through the Packington estate and on to Coleshill, where the Earls Digby held the manor. Coleshill had been granted to their family by Henry VII in 1496, and in 1575 George Digby of Coleshill Hall acquired the neighbouring manor of Sheldon from Sir Henry Grey, cousin of Lady Jane Grey whose father had previously held the manor. Their other seat, Sherborne Castle in Dorset, was purchased from Sir Walter Raleigh in 1617.
The Warwickshire and Dorset connection ran through the wider family as well. Admiral Sir Henry Digby G.C.B. (1770–1842), cousin to the Earl, made a fortune in prize money during the Napoleonic Wars and held the manor and estate of Minterne Magna in Dorset as well as lands at Sheldon. Among his Sheldon properties was Moat House, the moated hall south of St Giles Church, known earlier as Lyndon Manor House.
In the 1830s Moat House was occupied by Charles Nossiter (1783–1842). Born at Toller Fratrum in Dorset, Charles came to Sheldon in 1810 and farmed the Admiral’s two hundred acres along Westley Brook, from Moat House to Lyndon End on the Coventry Road and east to Sheldon Rectory. The 1840 tithe maps named Miss Caroline Meysey-Wigley as owner of nearby fields and of Olton Hall, within a mile of these lands.
Although Caroline was the owner, it was Squire Gumley Wilson who lived at Olton Hall in the early 1840s, leased from his cousin. The Squire moved there after having previously lived at Sheldon Rectory on the Birmingham to Coventry Road, where he was Charles Nossiter’s neighbour. The Rectory was set within its own small park but it was no hall. Wilson dismissed it as ‘a regular “citizen’s box,” ugly to a degree’.
Land ownership was changing alongside the innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Charles’s son, also Charles Nossiter (1810–1887), acquired freehold lands of his own in Lyndon End, adjacent to the Digby lands leased by his father. It was Charles Nossiter Jnr who occupied the cottage adjacent to Sheldon Rectory when the Squire was living there. Charles Nossiter Jnr was the same age as the Squire and both had young children. In 1845 Charles was granted Royal Letters Patent for improvements in the manufacture of leather. He founded a business in Birmingham and later acquired the freehold of Cateswell House in Hall Green.
The Manor of Diddington lay close to the Earl of Aylesford’s large estate around Packington Hall and was bordered to the west by the Manor of Hampton-in-Arden, which was purchased in 1840 by Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) on the eve of his second term as Prime Minister. Peel was the dominant political figure of his age. He was living at Drayton Manor, Staffordshire when he decided to acquire the lordship for his son. Hampton Manor House was described as little more than a rundown farmhouse but would be transformed, rebuilt in 1855 by Peel’s son.
Many of the manors in this landscape were changing form, absorbed into large estates, their courts long since lapsed, their identity preserved only in a name on a map. The four manors of Knowle, Diddington, Kinwalsey and Nuthurst remained intact as the Wilson family inherited them. A New and Compendious History of the County of Warwick, published in 1830, described Knowle Hall as ‘now used as a common farmhouse’, its distinguished origins apparently forgotten. Squire ‘Gumley’ Wilson inherited Knowle Hall a year after this publication. He chose to “pull down the greater part of the Hall, leaving only a few rooms for habitation when shooting over the property.” With no house to live in, he moved first to Sheldon, then Olton Hall while also taking up a lease on Gumley Hall in Leicestershire where “the situation was certainly the best in England, because you could hunt some five days per week without sending out horses the night before.” What value were his four Warwickshire manors without a stately house and park?
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