The genial Adrian Wield, who bought the house in 1987, has made the garden a perfect frame for the house, choosing shrubs that take 15 or more years to start flowering and are now in their first maturity. For a while he was a financial adviser to Ambrose Congreve, creator of the legendary gardens at Mount Congreve near Waterford, and many of the plants came direct from the nursery there.

Better still, the garden has been ingeniously planned for the longest possible flowering season, with early and late plants such as blue-flowered ceanothus and honey-scented philadelphus. To contain it all, Irish yews are pinned together from inside and shrubs wired up to stop them spreading. The beauty of the house is the warm butterscotch stone that glows as soon as the sun comes out. Tysoe, ten miles from Banbury, has the special charm of houses that have grown through the centuries. Each section of roof neatly indicates a different construction period. Succeeding generations have sought to blend, not contrast, with the earlier work, carefully matching both stone and roof tiles.

In the 14th century Tysoe belonged to the de Staffords, who had crossed to England with William the Conqueror. Theirs is the earliest block at the west of the long south-facing front. It is thought to date from the 1340s, just before the Black Death, and it retains a pretty Gothic window with twin pointed arches on the first floor. Excited professors from Norwich have pointed out that the house was once moated — following the line of the present ha-ha around the garden. Tysoe passed to the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, builder of Thornbury Castle, who met the familiar fate of those who surpass their king in the magnificence of their building and was beheaded.

The manor was granted to the Compton family, who soon after built one of the most glorious of all Elizabethan country houses, Compton Wynyates, in the next valley. Tysoe became a secondary house but important enough to be extended shortly after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. A new entrance was added in the 1720s.

Scandal hit the family when the 6th Marquess of Northampton had a romance with the actress Daisy Markham, who bore him twins. In a famous 1913 court case he was held to have broken his word to marry her and had to pay out £50,000, then the largest sum awarded for breach of promise. Tysoe was one of several farms sold – in this case to the tenant farmer.

In about 1928 the farmer sold the house to General Horace Sewell, a veteran of the First World War. He called in architects from Warwick to build a long new wing, cleverly linking with the haybarn to make Tysoe into the grand extended composition it is today. During the Second World War the Sewells went to Jamaica, though the general played a key role in the British Information Service in New York, while the manor housed refugee children from Coventry.

The long wings mean that Tysoe is the perfect place for different generations of a family to do what they like — loud music pulsating in far-flung sitting rooms will go unheard. The house could be a nightmare to heat but the Wields know that traditional wooden shutters are one of the best forms of insulation and these are in good working order throughout the house, with ingenious concertina shutters folding out across the long mullion windows.

General Sewell’s large handsome dining room has windows on three sides and massive doors formed of a sandwich of three planks of oak. The equally large room above with another wrap-round corner window has superb views over the garden and is furnished with impressively large desks so that the Wields can enjoy the sun while they work. Unusually the house has two imposing staircases with handsome turned balusters, one of the 1840s though in the manner of the 1720s , the other of 1928.

The big excitement of Tysoe is to find major elements of the 14th century inside. At the top of the stairs a duo of stone-pointed arches stand in a corner, while ascending to the attic you emerge beneath a splendid medieval great hall roof with five massive trusses — though unusually there are windbraces only on one side. “The carpenters knew the winds here come from the southwest,” says Benedicta Wield.

01608 653307, www.struttandparker.com

Pass Notes

The tall stone chimneys set diamond fashion on the roof are a distinctive feature of Tysoe. This is a 17th-century style seen at Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s home in Sussex, a stone house of 1634 with a range of six lofty chimneys set diagonally to the line of the roof. The architects of the 1930s wing designed their own variant: a solid rectangular stack with angled ends. Note how the chimney- stacks rise from square bases and are topped with a collar and a cornice.

WHAT YOU GET: Medieval manor house with eight bedrooms, seven bathrooms and 12¾ acres. Total of 11,100 sq ft.

WHERE IT IS: Ten miles from Banbury, eight miles from the M40. Trains from Banbury to Marylebone take 1½ hours.

SCHOOLS: Warwick School; Stratford High. WHERE TO EAT: Moon and Sixpence, Hanwell; Old Mill Hotel, Shipston-on-Stour.

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