Broughton Castle: Background information when reading The Music Room

Broughton Castle

This article relates to The Music Room

The unnamed location of William Fiennes' memoir is Broughton Castle, a medieval manor house near the village of Broughton, two miles southwest of Banbury, in the county of Oxfordshire, England.

The estate is situated at the confluence of three streams, making it an ideal location for a fortified manor house complete with moat. No one is sure when the first building was constructed at the site, but parts of the current structure date to around 1300 CE, when Sir John de Broughton II  began developing it. The property was sold in 1377 to William of Wykeham (Bishop of Winchester; Chancellor of England; founder of both Winchester College and New College, Oxford).

His descendent, Margaret Wykeham, and her husband, Sir William Fiennes, second Lord of Saye and Sele (a title his father had earned a few years earlier for services during Britain's Hundred Years' War against France) inherited Broughton in 1457.

Five generations later, around 1550, Richard Fiennes, Seventh Baron Saye and Sele, began expanding the house, transforming it into the elaborate Tudor-style manor house that makes up much of the current-day property.

The oldest part of the house is the dining room and a connecting hallway known as The Groined Passage (a groin is an architectural term referring to a type of ceiling design in which arches intersect to form a point - shown left).  Another notable feature is the moat, which is six feet deep and encircles an area of three acres.

Other interesting features include Queen Ann's Room, named to commemorate the 1604 visit of King James I's wife, and the King's Chamber, used by both James I and Edward VII. The formal walled Ladies' Garden on the south side of the castle was established in the 1880s, although its current fleur-du-leis design is based on advice provided by American Lanning Roper in 1970.

Across the moat from the castle is a rare 14^th century chapel with a stone altar, traceried windows and heraldic glass. Located there, too, are the elaborate family tombs of the Wykeham and Fiennes families, including that of the castles' founder Sir John de Broughton II.

Although the castle fell into disrepair in the 19^th century, later heirs have worked on restoring it to its full glory; the work is ongoing. Financial aid from the Historic Buildings Council enabled the repair of the stone-tiled roof in 1956, and English Heritage provided generous aid toward the £1 million repair of the castle's stonework in the 1980s and 1990s.

Broughton Castle has been featured in a number of films, including The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982), Three Men and a Little Lady (1990), The Madness of King George (1994) and Shakespeare in Love (1998).  It has also been the venue for concerts and recordings, including the 1981 Moat on a Ledge: Live from Broughton Castle, with performances by folk singers including Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

The Broughton Castle website

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Music Room. It originally ran in November 2009 and has been updated for the September 2010 paperback edition. Go to magazine.