Summary
West of Shrewsbury, on the former London to Holyhead road, Oxon Hall stands in a small landscape park with glimpses of the house caught between the trees from the road. It appears to be an eighteenth-century house, to which extensive additions were made in the early nineteenth century for the Spearman family and their successors the Morris (later Morris-Eyton) family.
The Spearmans had purchased Oxon in 1751 when it was sold following the death of John Cole by his granddaughters. The Coles, an ancient Shrewsbury family, had lived at Oxon since at least 1434. In the early nineteenth century it passed successively from John Spearman (d. 1824) to his brother Rev. Richard Spearman (d. 1826).
In 1830, the Hall was let to Rev. Francis Leighton, and two years later was acquired by Edward Morris (1798–1878) DL, JP. Morris’s father, Thomas Morris (1755–1817) was a solicitor of Newport, Shropshire, and his mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Rev. William Spearman of Donnington, a relative of the Oxon Spearmans. Unmarried, Morris also acquired the Montgomeryshire estate of Dol-Llys Hall in 1865, and served as Sheriff of that county in 1859. He lived at Oxon with his brother John Morris (d. 1860) and it was probably Edward who reinvented the house as Greek Revival villa. This involved extending and rendering the brick elevations, giving moulded surrounds to the central first-floor window, those of the lower east wing, and to the long six-bay west-facing side elevation. These early nineteenth-century works may well have been by Edward Haycock and appear to have, most notably, included the addition of the two full height bow windows with conical roofs and broad eaves, which stand to either side of the single-storey porch with Greek Doric pilasters and a flat entablature. It was probably during this remodelling that the house was given a new staircase with turned wooden balusters, which rises on two sides of the hall’s walls behind a screen of unfluted Ionic columns that divide the hall.
Edward Morris’ successor at both Oxon and Dol-Llys was his nephew, Charles John Morris (1831–1899). He was also the owner of Wood Eaton Manor, Staffordshire – which his other uncles, Charles and John Morris, had bought in 1845 – and served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1884. He was followed as owner of Oxon by his son, Charles Edward Morris-Eyton, who was Sheriff in 1905.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 493 - 494Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021