[1] The parish is bounded on three sides by Oxfordshire and is about 4 miles (6 km) north-west of Banbury.The name of the village has been spelt in various fashions over the centuries in a range of documents:- Sotteswalle around 1135, Shoteswell (1165), Schoteswell (1189), Schotewell (1190), Scoteswell (1221), Sotteswell (1235), Schetteswell (1315), Shotteswell (1428 and 1535), Shatswell (1705) as well as Cheleswell, Seteswell, Scacheswell and Shotswell, the latter in censuses of the mid-nineteenth century.

The village was not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, but may have been "the two hides of Warmintone (Warmington)" owned by Roger de Beaumont, Count of Meulan and "a man-at-arms from him".

[6] There was a second public house in the village, recorded in the 1861 national census, and also in existence around 1900, which was called "The New Inn"; on 27 February 1901, its proprietor, Luke Sharman, was fined £1 with 10s 6d costs at Kineton court for permitting gambling (darts for beer and tobacco) on the premises.

In September 2011 Regenco, a renewable energy developer, announced that it was exploring the possibility of building a wind farm adjacent to the M40 motorway between Shotteswell and Harbury and local inhabitants formed SHAMWAG (Shotteswell, Hanwell and Mollington Wind Farm Action Group) to resist this development.

In November and December 2011 the group was successful in its challenge when both Stratford-on-Avon District Council and Cherwell District Council rejected an application by Regenco to build a meteorological mast near Bury Court Farm although the company lodged an appeal with the Planning Inspectorate on 6 February 2012 which was eventually rejected on 22 June 2012.

A Wesleyan Chapel was opened in the village in 1854 but was closed before 1981, when it was used first as a workshop and afterwards as a hairdressing salon, eventually being sold in 1996 to be converted into a private house.

Simon Rice, a London merchant, purchased the moiety of the manor in 1514 and was succeeded by his widow, Lettice who held lands in 1531.

In 1462 the manor of Shotteswell was granted to Richard Harcourt for services to King Edward IV but the Botilers/Butlers were restored subsequently with the succession of John Butler, 6th Earl of Ormond, James' brother, who died childless in 1515 when the manor passed to Richard Farmer, a Calais merchant, who then sold it in 1537 to Sir Thomas Pope for £400.

The Norths, later Earls of Guilford, the family of the husband of Frances, the third sister, gained possession of the entire manor of Shotteswell until George Augustus (the member of parliament for Banbury from 1792 to 1794 and grandson of the former prime minister, Lord Frederick North) died in 1802 to be succeeded by his brother Francis, who held the manor as a trustee for his three nieces.

William Henry John, Lord North succeeded in 1894 when his father died and the manor was sold to B. J. Daunt of County Cork in September 1937.

This being the first major encounter of the war on 23 October 1642, there having been a minor skirmish the evening before at the nearby village of Wormleighton.

[17] In 1831 a notable crime was committed in the village when a bankrupt farmer, John Coleman, shot Edward Goode, an agricultural worker, fatally in the head and was charged with murder and subsequently tried at Warwick Assizes in 1832 where he was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter due to his mental disturbance brought on by the loss of his property.

It is recorded that one of the members of the White family, another Thomas, was the village constable at the time and it was he who apprehended Coleman after the killing.

[18] In 1888 the villagers of Shotteswell, as well as those of neighbouring Farnborough, Mollington and Ratley and Upton, expressed a preference for their villages to be transferred from Warwickshire to Oxfordshire in a "memorial" in response to the "Report of the Committee of County Magistrates upon the rectification of County and Union Boundaries in Oxfordshire".

A memorial plaque at the entrance to St Lawrence's Church records the names of five men associated with the village who died serving in the armed forces during the First World War, as well as naming four men who died similarly during the Second World War.

[20] The village was situated close to a Royal Air Force practice bombing range during World War II, and in his book A Thousand Shall Fall, the Canadian former pilot, Murray Peden, described how the village sometimes sustained inadvertent damage from bombs which had gone astray from Allied bombers using the practice range.

[22] The village is part of the Kineton division of Warwickshire County Council and is represented by Christopher Robin Williams (Conservative Party).

[23] The village is part of the Red Horse ward of Stratford-on-Avon District Council and is represented by Bart Dalla Mura (Conservative Party).

[24] The Parish Council has the following members:- Janet Burgess, Les Faulkner, Val Ingram, Anne Omer and Michael Pearson who were elected on 7 May 2015.

He was the centre of a national political scandal when he lied to the House of Commons, hiding the truth that whilst serving as war minister he was having an affair with Christine Keeler, a teenaged call-girl who was simultaneously having an affair with a Russian naval attaché, which raised serious national security issues.