A castle rediscovered: Ham Court, Oxfordshire The home of Matthew Rice

An ambitious castle in the Cotswolds area languished in obscurity after it was left unfinished in the early 14th century. Edward Impey investigates the remarkable story of this building and its recent revival

- Edward Impey

ON May 3, 1315, eight years into the reign of Edward II, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, obtained the King’s permission to fortify his manor house at Bampton in Oxfordshire. In this lies the origin of Bampton Castle, the exquisitely built and picturesque remains of which survive incorporated into a former farmhouse, called since the 17th century Ham Court (Fig 1). Although little known and neither finished nor ever used in anger, inform and purpose this is one of the more unusual and puzzling of England’s castles.

Aymer was born in about 1275. His paternal grandparents were the French nobleman Hugh, comte de la Marche, and Isabella of Angoulême, widow of King John of England and mother of Henry III (r. 1216–72). This made Aymer’s father, William de Valence, Henry’s half-brother, a familial link that yielded rich rewards. It also gained de Valence vast estates in France, in Poitou (centred on Poitiers), which passed to Aymer at his father’s death in 1296; he inherited his English, Welsh and Irish lands and the earldom from his mother in 1307. Further French lands, in the Pas de Calais, were acquired on his second marriage, in 1321, to Marie de St Pol (d. 1377), the founder, in 1347, of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who commissioned her husband’s sumptuous monument and effigy in Westminster Abbey (Fig 5).