Great Chalfield Manor is an English country house at Great Chalfield, about northeast of the town of Bradford on Avon in the west of the county of Wiltshire. History Pevsner describes Great Chalfield as "one of the most perfect examples of the late medieval English manor house". The moated manor house was built around 1465–1480 for Thomas Tropenell, a modest member of the landed gentry who made a fortune as a clothier. It is on the site of an earlier fortified house, of which traces remain: the bases of curtain walls to the east and north, and parts of two towers. The independent hall, lit on both sides, is flanked by unusually symmetrical gabled cross wings, with oriel windows and lower gabled porches in the inner corners, in the north-facing former entrance court, for which the richest effects were reserved. Its external symmetry, unusual for its date, is superficial. The intimately connected parish church, largely rebuilt by Tropenell, also faces into the court, which was formerly entered obliquely through a gatehouse in the west wing; Nicholas Cooper observes of the church that "the probable need to pass through the house's forecourt in order to reach it neatly demonstrates the community of secular and religious authority". Part of a moat survives, but the forecourt has been opened up to the outside in a manner that changes its original inward-facing aspect. The house passed into the Eyre family by the marriage of Ann Tropenell to John Eyre of Wedhampton in 1550. It passed down in the Eyre family for three generations until 1631 when Sir John Eyre sold it to Sir Richard Gurney, Lord Mayor of London. It afterwards passed via Thomas and William Hanham, John Hall of Bradford and Evelyn Pierrepont, 2nd Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull to Robert Neale. The house was altered substantially (with some of the original character lost) after the Neale family commissioned the architect Thomas Larkins Walker, a pupil of Pugin, to carry out a detailed survey of the manor in 1836; though his restoration proposals of 1837 were never carried out, the house was reduced and in particular, the great hall, adapted as a farmhouse, lost its ornate ceiling, with only one of the original bosses surviving. Externally there is a garden with four "tree houses", groups of four clipped yews that have grown together and been hollowed out inside to allow one to walk through. 20th