Feudal barony of Hatch Beauchamp

The site of the mediaeval manor house, to the immediate south of the ancient parish church of St John the Baptist, is today occupied by Hatch Court, a grade I listed[1] mansion built in about 1755 in the Palladian style.

[2] Hache was held from King Edward the Confessor (died 1066) by the Saxons Godric, Godwin and Bollo, as stated in the Domesday Book of 1086.

On the rebellion of the Count of Mortain against King William's younger son and successor to the English throne, his lands escheated to the crown, and were soon thereafter re-granted to the de Beauchamp family from Normandy.

He was aged about 8 at his father's death and became a ward of King John, who granted the wardship to his chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent (died 1243).

Robert V de Beauchamp (died 1264), son and heir, was summoned on many occasions by King Henry III to perform the military service required by his feudal tenure per baroniam, in Scotland and Wales.

The Seymour family (anciently de St. Maur) of Hatch is earliest recorded seated at Penhow Castle in Glamorgan in the 12th century.

[15] The ancestor of the "baronial St Maurs" was Wido de St Maur (died pre-1086) who came to England during the Norman Conquest of 1066, whose son William FitzWido is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a substantial tenant of Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances, and who held a feudal barony with lands in Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucester, with ten manors in Somersetshire (of which Portishead was one).

No conclusive evidence exists to confirm the "baronial St Maurs" and the "Seymours of Hatch" as derived from a common stock, however Camden believed this to be most probable.

[16] The two families adopted different arms at the start of the age of heraldry, c. 1200 – 1215, with the "baronial St Maurs" bearing: Argent, two chevrons gules.

He did not inherit his father's titles which had become forfeit, but was elevated to the peerage in 1559 by Queen Elizabeth I (King Edward VI's half-sister) as Baron Beauchamp and Earl of Hertford.

Eventually on the Restoration of the Monarchy he regained, in 1660 at the behest of King Charles II, the Dukedom which had been granted in 1547 to his great-grandfather Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (c. 1500 – 1552).

She also became representative as senior co-heir of Princess Mary Tudor (1496–1533), sister of King Henry VIII, through the families of Grey and Brandon.

In 1874 (William) Henry Lloyd, later of Hatch Beauchamp, toured the United States and Canada, researching the latest industrial developments and making contacts with fellow Quakers.

Henry Lloyd left Birmingham in 1899 and lived in Hatch Court until his death in 1917, having renovated the house and improved the woods and deer-park.

Herbert Stanley Gallimore, Rector of Hatch Beauchamp Church and twenty years her junior, who out of modesty for his clerical position preferred not to live in the grand manor house, and the couple moved into Laburnum Cottage on the estate.

[44] From 1923 Brigadier Andrew Hamilton Gault (1882–1958) and his second wife Dorothy Blanche Shuckburgh (1898–1972) (granddaughter of R.H. Shuckburgh, JP, of Bourton Hall, Warwickshire),[47] became tenants of Hatch Court, rented from Dorothy's aunt Mrs (Margaret) Percie Gallimore (née Chirnside and widow of (William) Henry Lloyd of Hatch Beauchamp),[44] and in 1931 Brigadier Gault bought the property and gave it to his wife.

He returned to Canada after World War II for tax reasons, where he died in 1958, having occupied for only three weeks his newly built mansion house on his estate at Mont Saint-Hilaire, which he bequeathed to his alma mater McGill University.

Following his death his widow returned to Hatch Court in 1959, and to keep her company invited her niece Mrs Anne Blanche Townson (1922–1995) and her family to live with her.

Anne was the eldest daughter of Lily Ellen Margaret ("Pearl") Shuckburgh (1894–1981) by her husband (Walter) Cecil Collett Sykes (died 1945), of Horsham in Sussex, of the Royal Flying Corps.

[44] Mrs Anne Townson's first husband died in 1967 and she remarried in 1971 to Barry Nation, a retired officer in the Fleet Air Arm.

In 1984, 11 years before her death,[44] she handed over Hatch Court to her daughter Mrs Jane Margaret Odgers (born 1951), who as a child had lived at Hatch Court with her family to provide company for her widowed great-aunt Mrs Dorothy Gault, and recalled that "My great aunt loved having us children around ... every Saturday morning we used to have breakfast in her bed, brought up by her Italian butler".

Jane is the wife of Dr Robin Odgers, a GP who became the local doctor after the couple with their two daughters, Susannah and Emma-Jane, moved there from London in 1983.

Dr Odgers renovated the one-and-a-half acre walled kitchen garden, from which he supplied the restaurant of the Castle Hotel in nearby Taunton.