From abbey land to the Caltons
In the Middle Ages Milton belonged to Abingdon Abbey. After the abbey was dissolved, Henry VIII granted the manor in 1546 to his Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, who sold it the same year to Thomas Calton and his wife Margaret. The Caltons held Milton for 218 years.
The 17th-century house
The heart of the present house is a tall, symmetrical block of red brick, three storeys high, with flat pilasters running up the front. The national list dates it to about 1670 and says it was built for Paul Calton the elder; the family who own it now think it was probably up by 1663, and a document of 1696 already called it newly built. It has long been linked with Inigo Jones, and the Victoria County History thought the attribution quite likely. The present family are more doubtful, and Jones had died in 1652. A great oak staircase rises from the cellars to the attics, and the drawing room has a mid-17th-century plaster ceiling that the list compares with the work of Jones’s pupil John Webb.
The Barretts and their Gothick rooms
In 1764 three unmarried Calton sisters sold the estate to Bryant Barrett, a lacemaker to George III. The family say he paid £10,600, having been asked for £13,000. Around 1776 he added the side wings, a kitchen and a brewhouse range, to designs by the architect Stephen Wright. Barrett was a Roman Catholic, and one wing holds a private chapel, fitted out in the fashionable Gothick style and glazed partly with old glass from Steventon church and with Flemish glass. It was rare for a Catholic family to have such a chapel at a time when their worship was still restricted by law. The library, also Gothick, has ogee-headed bookcases in the manner of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.
Stories say that William of Orange stayed here in 1688 and that Peter the Great visited, and the family once owned beds the two men are said to have slept in. These visits are traditions rather than recorded fact.
Later history
The house passed down the Barrett line to Louis Arthur Barrett, the last squire of Milton. Between the wars it stood empty, and from 1939 to 1945 it was occupied by the RAF, which left it badly run down. The next heir, Marjorie Barrett, later Mrs Mockler, moved in after the war. Much of the original furniture had been sold, but she restored the house as a family home and opened it to visitors. Her descendants still live there.
Visiting
Milton Manor House is a private home. It opens for about 30 days a year, mostly on bank holiday weekends and in late spring and late summer, with the house seen by guided tour only. The gardens, lakes and walled garden are open on the same days. Dates change each year, so check before travelling.