Phillips of Welcombe

Description

Papers, mainly title deeds and court rolls relating to estates acquired by the Phillips family in the nineteenth century at Welcombe (in Old Stratford), where the family mansion, now the Welcombe Hotel, was rebuilt in the 1860s, Snitterfield, Bearley, Wolverton and other neighbouring parishes, ranging in date from c.1450 to 1920. The nucleus of the estate comprised the manor of Snitterfield, purchased in 1816 by Robert Phillips, a northern industrialist, from George, Earl of Coventry, whose ancestor, John Hales had acquired it in 1545. To this he added the manor of Wolverton in 1820. Later, in 1845, his son, Mark Phillipps, Manchester's first Member of Parliament, purchased the manor of Welcombe, and he and then his brother, Robert Needham Phillipps, continued to buy up cottages and other small pieces of property in and around these villages until Robert's death in 1890. The estate then passed to his son-in-law, George Otto Trevelyan. Apart from an important series of over 100 court rolls for the manor of Snitterfield, 1462-1713, the collection comprises almost exclusively title deeds to the family estates in the villages above mentioned, c.1545-1920. There are one or two maps, however, and several of the conveyances, from 1816, have plans drawn onto them, including an important one of the manor of Snitterfield when purchased from the earl of Coventry in 1816. This can be used in conjunction with a fine map of the estate of the same date (ER 103/1) acquired from a different source. Alongside this (ER 103/2) is a map of the estate in Wolverton purchased by Robert Phillipps in 1820.