Ghosts · Oxfordshire

The Unjust Judge of Great Tew

Great Tew, between Chipping Norton and Banbury

Spooky: for older readers

In about 1614 a great lawyer bought the manor of Great Tew. He was Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Lord Chief Baron,, one of the highest judges in England.

Ten years later, in 1624, “the poor oppressed inhabitants of Great Tewe” sent a petition to the House of Commons, and it set out their complaints one by one. He had shut them out of Cowhill pasture, where their cattle had always grazed, saying it was his waste ground. He had fenced in seven pieces of the best grazing and impounded any beast that strayed onto them. He had dug up the boundary stones and marks, so that he could lay claim to land their families had farmed for four hundred years.

He wouldn't give them the timber their leases promised for mending their houses, and then he fined them for not mending them. He wouldn't pay his church dues. He stripped the lead off the church chancel to make pipes and gutters for his own house. He knocked down the churchyard wall and turned part of the churchyard into his own pasture. He even stopped the straw they had always had from the parsonage barn to kneel on in church. Where there had been twenty-six plough teams in the village, now there were twelve.

And his lady, they said, was worse than he was. She declared that they deserved to be ground to powder rather than shown any favour, and that she would play “the very devil” among them.

The judge died the next year. But the village never forgot him. Long after the great house had gone, the people of Great Tew still said that the unjust judge could not rest. At midnight, they said, he comes driving round an ancient elm in the park, in a coach drawn by six horses.

No plate yet. We are still looking for an old picture of this place.

What people said

  • The coach-and-six. Herbert Evans heard in 1905 that “an ancient elm in the park is still haunted by the restless ghost of the ‘unjust judge’, and at midnight he is wont to drive around it in a coach-and-six.”
  • Forgotten scholars, remembered judge. Evans noticed that the villagers had forgotten all about the famous scholars who visited Lord Falkland at Great Tew before the Civil War, but still remembered the judge who had wronged the village.

Other tellings

  • The judge's side. Sir Lawrence answered the petition. He said the disputes had long been settled by law or arbitration, and that the petition was a tissue of lies written by one John Hiron, “a man very malicious, of a violent spirit and extremely audacious”, who hadn't dared to sign it. The House of Commons seems to have accepted his answer, because nothing more was heard of it.
  • [TODO: an earlier record of the ghost than Evans (1905)]

What the history says

Sir Lawrence Tanfield was real. He bought Great Tew in about 1614, the villagers' petition of 1624 is a real document, and he died in 1625. His wife died in 1629, and their grandson, Lord Falkland, inherited the estate. Falkland made the house a famous meeting place for scholars before the Civil War. The estate passed out of the family at the end of the 1600s, and the old house was pulled down about a hundred years later.

Evans thought the villagers' complaints were “a pretty severe indictment”, but reminded his readers there was another side to it. We have only the petition and the judge's answer to go on.

Go and See

Where
Great Tew village, between Chipping Norton and Banbury. The church of St Michael stands in the park, close to the gardens of the big house. The pin marks the church.
Access
[TODO: church opening times, and which parts of the park have public paths. The house and gardens are private]
Allow
An hour to walk round the village and visit the church.
Families
A ghost story about a real man, told by people who felt he'd wronged them. Fine for older children. Nothing in it is gruesome.

51.9569° N, 1.4204° W · Open in OpenStreetMap

Make a day of it

From our sister sites

The Name GeneratorsName a ghost of your ownPale ladies, grey monks and headless horsemen.Acorn & InkWrite your own legendStory planners to print. Whose ghost would your village remember?

Sources

  1. Herbert A. Evans, Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds (1905), chapter 16, pp. 385–386, including his summary of the villagers' petition of 1624 and the judge's answer. Our main source. Internet Archive.

This is a legend, told as people told it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.