Shirburn Castle

Nineteenth-century accounts of Shirburn, drawn mainly from a short History of Shirburn Castle compiled by Lady Macclesfield in 1887, held that the Norman baron Robert D'Oyly, who came over with the Conqueror in 1066, raised a castle here, and that it was surrendered to the Empress Matilda in 1141 as part of a ransom. None of it has been verified; the story may simply reflect a wish for a more ancient origin than the site can support. The Victoria County History records only the manor of West Shirburn, held in the 13th century by Robert de Burghfield and likely to have stood where the present castle does. A supposed visit by Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, quoted in the same sources, turned out to be a forgery in a book of 1948.

An earlier Warin de Lisle apparently held the estate and was executed at York in 1322 for his part in an insurrection, his widow later pardoned and the lands restored. In 1377 his grandson, another Warin de Lisle, was granted the licence to crenellate, and construction of the present moated castle followed around 1378, the design attributed to Henry Yevele. What stands today is quadrangular, of two to three storeys, with four rounded corner towers.

Anthony Emery, setting it beside Sir Edward Dalyngrigge's near-contemporary Bodiam in Sussex, found similar original features but judged that Shirburn "seems to have had less of a martial air", its entrance front weaker than Bodiam's twin-towered gatehouse. The long-repeated claim that Shirburn is the earliest brick building in Oxfordshire appears to rest on a misconception: Emery believes it was probably built entirely in limestone, the brick casing added only in the Georgian remodelling of 1720.

De Lisle died in 1382 and the castle passed to his daughter, who married Lord Berkeley, and then to her daughter, wife of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. The Talbots, Quatremains and Fowlers owned or occupied it in turn before it was sold to the Chamberlains: Edward Chamberlain, whose mother had leased the estate from her brother in 1505, died here in 1543, and Sir Leonard Chamberlain, Governor of Guernsey from 1553, followed him.

In the Civil War Richard Chamberlain held Shirburn for the King and surrendered it to Sir Thomas Fairfax in 1646, apparently without damage; by the Victoria County History's account the castle was never besieged and gave way only after terms were agreed. The last male of the line, John Chamberlain, died in 1651 leaving two daughters as co-heirs, and by 1682 Shirburn had passed to Joseph Gage. The Gages fitted out an armoury with broadswords, pistols and muskets marked to the family, the kit of a household militia against unrest or French invasion. In 1714 another Thomas Gage came into a Gloucestershire estate and a fortune through his wife, and resolved to sell.

Thomas Parker, later first Earl of Macclesfield and Lord Chancellor from 1718 to 1725, bought Shirburn together with Clare manor in 1716 for £25,696 8s. 5d., and spent a further £5,000 on the building works. Emery reckons the renovations probably affected more than three-quarters of the fabric, leaving "essentially an eighteenth-century interpretation of the medieval castle, following its original plan", though part of the west range and the lower stages of two corner towers survive from the 14th century.

Parker began the library that had grown to some 12,700 printed books and 260 manuscripts by the third Earl's death in 1795. His son George, the second Earl, built an observatory and a chemical laboratory here and was observing from 1740; Thomas Hornsby watched the transit of Venus from the grounds in 1761. Newton's letters reached the house through William Jones, tutor to the second Earl, who had acquired the archive of the mathematician John Collins.

In 1922 the seventh Earl transferred ownership to the family estate company to reduce tax, which uncoupled the automatic right to occupy the castle from inheritance of the title. After a long court battle the ninth Earl was evicted by the other family members and left in 2005, keeping the contents his grandfather had given him in 1967. Sotheby's catalogued the libraries in 2004: a first edition of Copernicus of 1543 made £666,400, the 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter £1,685,600 and, in 2010, Stubbs's Brood Mares and Foals of 1768 £10,121,250, a record for the artist. Newton's correspondence went to Cambridge University Library. Still owned by the Macclesfield family company in 2022, the castle is not open to the public.