Explore "Memory Hold-The-Door" by John Buchan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Elsfield was like the dwelling of Axylos, the son of Teuthras, in the _Iliad_, a house by the roadside. It opened on the village street, but, being built on the slope of a hill, its back view was superb, covering the Cherwell valley and all the western Cotswold. The oldest part was alleged to have twelfth-century walls, contemporary with the little church; but its form was Jacobean and the rest was Oxford gothic of the 'seventies. The manor had had few owners since the days of the Saxon Aella: the Norman grantee, the Pudseys from Yorkshire, the Hores from East Anglia, and then until nearly the end of last century it was a kind of dower-house for the North family at Wroxton, further up the Cherwell.[1] It was a clearing in the forest long before the Conquest, and a clearing it remained, so that at the siege of Oxford the Parliament army used it as a gun-park.
[1. The history of the parish has been written by Professor G. N. Clark of Oxford.]