Manor
Between AD 801 and 805 one Byrhtelm granted land at Froxfield to Ealhmund, Bishop of Winchester. There is no further record of Froxfield's manorial tenure from then until the 13th century. The Domesday Book of 1086 does not mention Froxfield, and may therefore have included the manor as part of another landholding.
Froxfield reappears in the historical record in 1242-43, when Baldwin de Redvers, 6th Earl of Devon was its feudal overlord. In 1275 the overlord was Baldwin's heir Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon, but there is no evidence of Froxfield passing to her heirs. John de Cobham, 3rd Baron Cobham was overlord in 1389, but there is no record of Froxfield's overlordship thereafter.
Manorial tenants of Froxfield included Walter Marshal, 5th Earl of Pembroke (died 1245) and John Droxford, who was Bishop of Bath and Wells 1309-1329.
In 1390 Sir William Sturmy gave the manor to Easton Priory, which then held Froxfield until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1536 the Crown granted the manor to Sir Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp, who in 1547 made himself Duke of Somerset. After the death of John Seymour, 4th Duke of Somerset in 1675, his widow Sarah Seymour, Duchess of Somerset married Henry Hare, 2nd Baron Coleraine. However, when she died in 1694 she left most of Froxfield Manor as an endowment to found the Broad Town charity and Duchess of Somerset's Hospital almshouses (see below). The hospital sold most of its lands in the parish in 1920-22.
In 1922 Sir Ernest Wills, 3rd Baronet, part-owner of the W.D. & H.O. Wills tobacco company, bought Froxfield Manor Farm, before purchasing the adjacent Elizabethan country house, Littlecote House, in 1929. In 1965 William Geoffrey Rootes, 2nd Baron Rootes bought some other parts of the manor lands and added them to his estate of North Standen and Oakhill. In 1995 Wills's grandson Sir Seton Wills, 5th Baronet still held part of the original estate north of London Road.
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