Wroxton Abbey
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Wroxton Abbey is a Jacobean house, with a 1727 garden partly converted to the serpentine style between 1731 and 1751. It is 2.5 miles (4 km) west of Banbury, off the A422, in Wroxton St. Mary. It is now Fairleigh Dickinson University's English campus.
Wroxton Abbey is a modernized, 17th century Jacobean manor house built on the foundations of a 13th century Augustinian priory. The abbey boasts a great hall, minstrels' gallery, chapel, multi-room library, and royal bedrooms. In addition, there are 45 bedrooms (each with private bath), seminar rooms, offices, basement recreation rooms, and a reception area.
Wroxton Abbey, named for its twelfth-century origins as a monastery that fell into disrepair after Henry VIII's 1536 dissolution. Remnants of that structure remain in the basement beams, though the building literally rose from the ruins when rebuilt by William Pope in the early 1600s and added to for several centuries after that as the property passed from the Popes to the Norths in 1677.
The various Lord Norths and their families, including Frederick, Lord North and their royal, literary, and Presidential visitors — James I, Charles I, George IV, William IV, Teddy Roosevelt, Horace Walpole, Henry James, Frederick, Prince of Wales (killed in 1751 when his skull was fractured by a tennis ball) — as well as the structure itself, led to the Abbey's designation as a Grade One historic site.
The grounds are composed of 56 acres (230,000 m²) of lawns, lakes, and woodlands, and comprise a serpentine lake, a cascade, a rill and a number of follies by Sanderson Miller: a Gothic Dovecot, the Drayton Arth and the Temple-on-the-Mount. W. A. Nesfield advised on a formal flower garden on the south side of the house. A knot garden has been added in the twentieth century and was illustrated by Blomfield as an example of a 'modern garden'. He wrote that 'Nothing can be more beautiful than some of the walks under the apple trees in the gardens of Penshurst'.
Wroxton Abbey currently serves as home to Fairleigh Dickinson Univeristy's Wroxton College.
