Boarstall Tower, originally a gatehouse, is all that remains of the manor house of Boarstall, fortified in 1312 by John de Haudio. The main house was pulled down by Sir John Aubrey in 1783.
An ancestor of his – another Sir John – is associated with a story from the civil war. Boarstall was taken in turn by King and Parliament, and while Charles’s forces were in control, he wrote asking for the bells of Boarstall church to be sent to his headquarters at Oxford to be melted down for gunmetal. He never got the bells – or rather, there is no record of their having been sent – and it was believed thast they had been thrown down the well for safety until the end of the war. It is said that Sir John sent a man down the well to find them, but abandoned the search when in doing so he broke his leg. More recent searches of the well have also failed to discover the bells. The story has elements in common with local legends of lost bells and repeated failure to recover treasure from under water, and may not be historical.
The later Sir John is said to have destroyed his house because of a family tragedy. When his son was about five years old, he refused to eat his gruel, saying it tasted bad. Thinking he was being difficult, his nurse added what she thought was sugar and made him eat it. By mistake she had used a mixture of oatmeal and arsenic meant for killing the rats. The boy died and his mother never got over the shock, dying a year later, and Sir John demolished the house.
The best-known of Boarstall’s traditions is connected with the Boarstall Horn. According to Parochial Antiquities (1818), Boarstall was said to be so-named from a boar, which interrupted the sport of Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-66) and was slain by one Nigel, who received the manor as a retward on ‘tenure by cornage’, the presentation of a horn. This was one of the many medieval tenures whereby the tenant confirmed the arrangement annually by presenting his feudal overlord with some visible symbol which served in the absence of written records as proof of the agreement between them.
A flaw in this tale of Boarstall’s origins is that, despite appearances, its first element is not Old English bār, (boar), but burh (fort or town). Although long established as a historical tradition, the story of Nigel Shortshirt is almost certainly a clever fabrication of the 15th century.