‘A mistake, and very costly, too’ Leweston Manor, Dorset The home of Leweston School

Roger White reports on an unusual creation

ALTHOUGH Leweston Manor near Sherborne is a building of relatively recent date and, during term time, is thronged with teenagers, the site itself has an ancient history. The Tudor historian John Leland, travelling in the West Country in 1542, noted that the eponymous Lewston family who then owned the estate had been resident in the area since before the Conquest; in 1346, the owner was certainly Walter de Lewston. However, on the death of John Lewston in 1584, the male line ran out and the estate devolved to John Fitzjames, the son of Lewston’s second wife by a previous marriage.

As a gesture of gratitude for his good fortune, Fitzjames seems to have paid for a handsome monument to Lewston and his wife, who lie under a Corinthian canopy in Sherborne Abbey. It has been suggested that this may have been made by the French master mason Allen Maynard, who died in 1598, which perhaps raises the possibility of him having been involved in the ‘beautification’ of the medieval house at Lewston that John Coker, in, 1732, claimed Fitzjames had embarked on.