Boscobel House

Boscobel House (grid reference SJ837082) is a Grade II* listed building in the parish of Boscobel in Shropshire. It has been, at various times, a farmhouse, a hunting lodge, and a holiday home; but it is most famous for its role in the escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Today it is managed by English Heritage.

The building is just inside Shropshire, as is clear from all Ordnance Survey maps of the area, although part of the property boundary is contiguous with the Shropshire – Staffordshire border, and it has a Stafford post code. Boscobel is on land which belonged to White Ladies Priory in the Middle Ages, and at that time it was extra-parochial. The priory was often described as being at Brewood, which is in Staffordshire, and this may have contributed to the widespread belief that the house and priory are in Staffordshire. Brewood is the neighbouring parish, and the house is just south of the small village of Bishops Wood, a constituent part of Brewood. Although technically still a separate civil parish, Boscobel's small population means it shares a parish council with Donington, Shropshire. Local government reform in 1974 brought the parish, including Boscobel House and White Ladies, into Bridgnorth District, which in 2009 was superseded by the new unitary authority of Shropshire Council. The nearest city is Wolverhampton. The house is just north of the M54 Motorway.

Boscobel House was created around 1632, when landowner John Giffard of White Ladies Priory converted a timber-framed farmhouse, built some time in the 16th century on the lands of White Ladies Priory, into a hunting lodge. The priory and its estate, including the farmhouse site, had been leased from the Crown by William Skeffington of Wolverhampton at the Dissolution of the Monasteries about a century earlier. It passed into the Giffard family because Skeffington left it to his widow, Joan, and she subsequently married Edward Giffard, son of Sir Thomas Giffard of Chillington (died 1560) and grandson of Sir John Giffard (died 1556) of Chillington Hall. The reversion was sold to William Whorwood in 1540, which made him the effective owner, but one of the early lessees must have paid off Whorwood, because it was later passed on to Edward Giffard's heir, John. John Giffard decided to make the farmhouse more useful by building a substantial extension to the south, including a living room and bedrooms more fitted to use by a gentry family. Giffard called the new hunting lodge Boscobel House. Thomas Blount (writing 1660), the main source for the events, portrays the naming as an after-dinner activity, and attributes it to Sir Basil Brook(e), a prominent recusant from Madeley, Shropshire, who was one of Giffard's guests at the housewarming party. Boscobel is believed to come from the Italian phrase bosco bello meaning "in the midst of fair woods": in 1632, Boscobel House was surrounded by dense woodlands. Also, the many branches of the Giffard family all claim ancestry from the lords of Bolbec or Bolebec and Longueville in Upper Normandy: Osbern de Bolebec became lord of Longueville in the early 11th century and his sons, Osbern Giffard and Gautier or Walter Giffard of Bolbec, were companions of William the Conqueror.

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