Nuneham Courtenay is a village and civil parish about 5 miles (8 km) SSE of Oxford.
Most of the Bluebell Wood nature reserve is on the eastern slopes, across Marsh Baldon's straight and touching boundary.
[2] Just southeast of Lower Farm, about 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) northwest of the present Nuneham Courtenay village, is the site of a former Romano-British pottery kiln.
Baldwin died without an heir, so Newenham again passed to a female "overlord", Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon.
She too died without an heir, but in 1310 King Edward II granted Newenham to Hugh de Courtenay, 9th Earl of Devon.
[2] Under the terms of the sale Margaret de Bohun, 2nd Countess of Devon retained the use of Newenham Courtenay for life.
After some legal problems concerning the title to the manor, in 1425 Isabel and Hatfield sold the reversion of the manor, reserving a life interest to themselves, to Thomas Chaucer (c. 1367–1434 or 1435), son of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Speaker of the House of Commons on five occasions between 1407 and 1421.
[2] In 1514 Henry VIII made his brother-in-law Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk, and granted him the forfeited de la Pole estates.
Calvert wasted his father's fortune, sold Newenham Courtenay in 1653, was imprisoned as a debtor, and died in the King's Bench Prison in Southwark in 1666.
The 1st Earl demolished the house, medieval church, and 'tumble-down clay-built' cottages of the village,[7] and built a new parish church with an entirely new Nuneham Courtenay village almost 1 mile (1.6 km) north east to make way for his planned English style landscape park and new Nuneham House.
It was made a Grade II listed building in 1963 as part of the "Nuneham Courtney Park and Garden".
[9][10] The new village comprised two identical rows of brick-built semi-detached cottages, each of a single main storey plus an attic floor with dormer windows.
The two identical rows face each other across the main road from Oxford to Reading and Henley-on-Thames, which had been made a turnpike in 1736.
[2] In the 1760s the Irish writer, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of a medieval village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden.
[14] The Poet Laureate William Whitehead was a visitor, and it was he who coined the change of spelling from "Newenham" to "Nuneham" in 1764.
[2] The Archbishop of York commissioned the architect Robert Smirke to make unaesthetic but functional extensions to the house in the 1830s.
[15] Brown had planned a Gothic Revival tower folly for a prominent site overlooking the Thames.
[16] In the 1830s Edward Venables-Vernon-Harcourt, Archbishop of York, destroyed William Mason's formal flower garden and most of the landscape park's sculptures.
He bought and added adjacent land in Marsh Baldon parish to extend the park eastwards as far as the Oxford–Dorchester main road.
There was then a parish church of All Saints that served the village from the Middle Ages until the 1760s, but little information about it survives.
The Earl was an amateur architect and designed the church himself in the Neoclassical Greek Revival style, aided by the Neoclassicist James "Athenian" Stuart.
It is conventionally oriented, with its entrance on the west facade and altar in the east end, but also has a doorless Ionic portico on its north side overlooking the River Thames.
The church is positioned on a slight rise on the river bluff to maximise its effect in the landscape park design.
[2] The removal of the village to a new site put the 1764 church almost 1-mile (1.6 km) away by winding, partly wooded footpaths.