‘Good & Not Expensive . . .’: Lord Harcourt’s Nuneham Courtenay

Extract

The definitive historical study of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the village of Nuneham Courtenay, a few miles south-east of Oxford, was published more than thirty years ago. In a wide-ranging essay Mavis Batey recounted how the first Earl Harcourt, founding President of the Dilettanti Society, embarked in 1761 on the creation of an appropriate landscape garden to complement the setting of his newly completed classical villa. An essential preliminary to the landscaping was the necessity to remove the medieval village out of sight of views of the house, and as early as 1760 work had already begun on building a new settlement outside the confines of the park. Progress was rapid, and by the autumn of 1761 the new estate village placed astride the Oxford-Henley turnpike was a going concern (Fig. 1). There is little to add to Mrs Batey’s account of the controversy that accompanied this arrogant display of the power exercised by eighteenth-century landlords over the lives of their tenantry apart from taking the opportunity to record that her own further research has confirmed the tentative identification of Nuneham with Oliver Goldsmith’s critical poem The Deserted Village. An entry in the manuscript notebooks of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, recording a visit to Lord Harcourt on 20 August 1800, reads:

The village was originally in the Park at no great distance from the House and consisted of pretty white cottages, scattered round a small piece of water and shaded with a number of very fine trees. The late Lord Harcourt thinking the village too near the house, built a new one on the Oxford road, about a mile from the mansion house. But the poor people were very unwilling to leave their old habitation and several houses in the New Village remained for a long time uninhabited. And this was Goldsmith’s Deserted Village — so Lord Harcourt told me.