Late 16th century country house, reduced from three to two storeys in the 19th century and subsequently modernised. Built of coursed limestone rubble with an old clay tile hipped roof. The house stands on the site of a 14th century fortified house or castle. The earthwork remains associated with the medieval site survive. Not open to the public.
Six miles N.W. of Bedford are the remains of the old moated house of the St. Johns. There is a licence to Johannes de Pateshull (1 Edward III.) to crenellate his mansum at Bletnesho.
The greater part of a later erection of the early seventeenth century has long been pulled down, and what remained converted into a farmhouse. It was a large quadrangular building in four storeys, with four gable windows, having an ancient bridge over the moat. Some vestiges of the early castellated mansion are seen near the house.
The manor was held, at the Norman survey, by Hugh de Beauchamp, and Sir Roger de Beauchamp, chamberlain to Edward III., lived here as Baron Beauchamp of Bletsoe. His granddaughter and heiress, Margaret, married first Sir Oliver St. John, and, after his death, John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, by whom she had one daughter, the wife of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and the mother of King Henry VII., who was born at this house. Here lived her mother, the Duchess of Somerset, in great state, when married to a third husband, Leo, Lord Welles. Her first husband’s descendant was, in 1559, created Lord St. John of Bletsoe, and the property continues still in that same family. (Castles Of England, Sir James D. Mackenzie, 1896)
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