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Question
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Could you tell me anthing about the history of Shaw Manor House in Wilthire please.
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Question asked on
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04 July 2011
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Answer
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Shaw House was the successor to the old manor house at Shaw. The manor is first mentioned in the 13th century. The name comes from the Saxon word for a wood or copse and the earliest surviving record of the name here is 1256. Your name will have come from someone who came from a place called Shaw, of which there are several, in the 13th or 14th centuries when surnames were becoming more common.
In 1701 John Ashe sold the Shaw to Thomas Smith and he rebuilt the house in 1711. For 50 years his family made it a centre of country life in north western Wiltshire. A copy of Smith's diary for the years 1715-1723 is in the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, in Trowbridge, and there is an extensive article on the diary in the Wiltshire Archaeological magazine, Vol. 82, 1988, pp 115-141. By 1759 the estate had been bought by Robert Neale of Corsham and it passed to Sir Harry Burrard-Neale in 1776. He let the house as a private school. In the later 19th century it was bought by William Stancombe, a cloth factory owner of Trowbridge, and members of the family lived there. By the 1950s it was a Wiltshire County Council home for the elderly
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