Ebrington Manor, just South West of the church , is 13th century in origin. Sadly you don’t get to see the best of the house from the back, and the front drive is protected by two splendid gatepiers, built around 1700 and topped with fine stone vases, with curved walls to subsidiary piers, all suitably intimidating and enough to keep us from intruding.

This house is lived in by the Fortescue family, whose ancestor, Sir John Fortescue bought the place just before the wars of the roses, the English civil wars fought between1455 and 1457.
Sir John Fortescue, born in Somerset, was a jurist, notable for a legal treatise, De laudibus legum Angliae, which translates as “In Praise of the Laws of England”). He wrote it for the instruction of Edward, prince of Wales, son of the deposed king Henry VI of England.

He also stated a moral principle that remains, to this day, basic to the Anglo-American jury system: It is better that the guilty escape than that the innocent be punished.

Fortescue became chief justice of the King’s Bench in 1442 and was knighted the following year. After the defeat of Henry VI’s Lancastrian army at Towton, Yorkshire in 1461, he fled with Henry to Scotland, where Fortescue was appointed lord chancellor of the exiled government.

From 1463 to 1471 he lived in France at the court of Henry’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, where he helped to educate Prince Edward to rule England in the event of a Lancastrian restoration.