Summary
Gatacre represents one of the ancient seats of Shropshire that was the home, from at latest the thirteenth century until the twentieth century in this particular case, of an eponymous family. The earliest recorded member of the family to be possessed of Gatacre seems to have been Stephen de Gatacre, who held the manors of Gatacre and Sutton in the reign of Henry III and who was married to Alice, daughter and co-heiress of Richard de Bassett. Several of the sixteenth-century members of the family are commemorated by a series of interesting monuments in the South Chapel at All Saints Church in Claverley. These monuments include an incised slab, possibly by the Royley workshop, to William Gatacre (1506–1577), Escheator of Salop 1524–42 who is depicted in armour, together with his wife Eleanor, daughter of William Mytton of Coton Hill and Habberley and their eleven children. Another incised slab is a memorial to their second surviving son, Francis Gatacre (d. 1599) who was both imprisoned and fined as a recusant and who had married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey Swinnerton of Swinnerton, Staffordshire and the widow of William Fitzherbert.
The house that preceded the present largely eighteenth-century brick house was timber framed and is reputed, by nineteenth-century writers, to have had an unusual construction:
The walls of the mansion of this ancient family were remarkable, on account of their being built of a dark grey freestone, coated with a thin greenish vitrified substance, about the thickness of a crown-piece, without the appearance of any joint or cement to unite the several parts of the building, so that it seemed one entire piece; a most effectual preservation against bad weather. The hall was nearly an exact square, singularly constructed. At each corner, and in the middle of each side, and in the centre, were immense oak trees hewed nearly square, and without branches, set with their heads on large stones, laid about a foot deep into the ground, and with their roots uppermost; which roots, with a few rafters, formed a complete arched roof. The floor was of oak boards, three inches thick, not sawed but plainly chipped.
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- Information
- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 263 - 265Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021