Grevel's House, Chipping Campden

Grevel's House stands on the north-west side of the High Street in Chipping Campden, with a two-storey Perpendicular bay window that its listing calls exceptionally fine. It is named after William Grevel, the wool merchant who died in 1401 and is buried in St James's. It is listed Grade I and is a private house.

History

The house carries the name of Campden's greatest wool merchant, though how far it was his home is uncertain. The town's history society counts it among his three monuments, with his brass and the church he helped to rebuild, and says he built it; Historic England's listing is more cautious, calling the building complex and enigmatic and not necessarily Grevel's house at all.

William Grevel

Grevel came of a family settled in Campden by 1276. He was perhaps the richest and most influential Cotswold wool merchant of his time, and he put his profits into land: by his death in 1401 he held 14 houses in Campden, and he had bought manors from Lasborough in the south Cotswolds to Milcote near Stratford, where he spent his last years. In August 1397 Richard II acknowledged receiving 300 marks from him. His brass in St James's calls him the flower of the wool merchants of all England, and through his son Ludovic his family led to Sir Fulke Greville, the Elizabethan poet, and the Earls of Warwick.

The building

The listing reads the building as a medieval structure, possibly a fourteenth-century barn, made into a house and remodelled in the late sixteenth century, when the great bay was brought in from elsewhere, with later changes. Inside, the plan of the sixteenth century survives, with a hall and a parlour, and the roof over the hall is still blackened by smoke, a sign that the hall was lived in before the Tudor remodelling.

What to look for

The bay window to the right of centre is the reason to stop. The listing calls it exceptionally fine: two storeys high, six lights wide, with tracery in the windows and in the panels between them, and topped by carved gargoyles. Then look for:

• An altered sixteenth-century bay window to the left
• A seventeenth-century mullioned window
• A sundial on one of the gables
• What appears to be a fourteenth-century doorway

Inside, which is not open, the parlour's bay has a tierceron vault. Woolstaplers' Hall, another merchant's house, stands almost opposite.

Visiting

Grevel's House is a private home, so it is seen only from the pavement. The High Street is level, and the best view of the bay window is from the far side of the street.

Getting there

By car, park in Back Ends, where the National Landscape's walk leaflet and the Chipping Campden Online community website send walkers to park free, or in the Market Square car park (GL55 6AW), which charges from 7am to 7pm by card or phone and takes no cash; the house is about 180m along the High Street from the Market Hall. Stagecoach buses 1, 1A, 2 and 2A stop in the town between Stratford-upon-Avon and Moreton-in-Marsh station.

On foot, Chipping Campden from Broad Campden, a 3.3-mile (5.3km) loop, comes along the High Street past the house.

Nearby

Grevel's brass is in the chancel of St James's Church, at the end of Church Street, past the almshouses. The Market Hall is a short walk west. The Bantam Tea Rooms and the Lygon Arms are about 100m back along the High Street. Our story on the wool churches of the Cotswolds tells how men like Grevel paid for the churches.