The Harcourts first came into possession of Stanton over seven hundred years ago. It was in 1125 that the second Queen of Henry the First gave the property to one Millicent de Camville, whose daughter married Richard de Harcourt, thus the first of a long line of that family, which really ended with the mother of Edward Vernon, who assumed his mother’s maiden name, and died in 1847, as Archbishop of York. The later and present Harcourts are therefore really Vernons. The ancient and beautiful manor-house of Stanton Harcourt, a group of buildings forming a quadrangle, was built about the middle of the fifteenth century, with a rebuilt gatehouse tower of a century later, the work of a Simon Harcourt of that period. The house was occupied until 1688; and then, with the death of Sir Philip Harcourt, it fell upon evil times, for his widow deserted the place. Nuneham Courtney, which, in the course of these pages, we shall visit, below Oxford, had been purchased in 1710 by a later Simon Harcourt, and to it the family seat was removed, and the manor-house at Stanton allowed still further to fall into decay. Seventy years later the buildings, by that time mostly ruinous, were demolished, with the exception of the gatehouse, one of the towers of the mansion, and the curious and interesting ancient kitchen, which has only one fellow to it in England: the well-known and remarkable Abbot’s Kitchen at Glastonbury. This Stanton Harcourt kitchen, standing now beside quiet lawns, and overgrown with creepers and ivy, has long lost any association with cookery, and looks particularly ecclesiastical, except perhaps for the rampant griffin, holding a vane, which crowns the tall pyramidal tiled roof, and wears rather a devilish expression. He is a formidable griffin, too, measuring eight feet high. [Illustration: THE KITCHEN, STANTON HARCOURT.] To properly impress the reader, or the beholder, with this kitchen, it is necessary to give its dimensions. It has a total height of seventy-two feet, made up of thirty-nine feet of the wall, twenty-five feet roof, and the eight feet, as aforesaid, of that banner-bearing monster. There are no chimneys. The fires were made against the walls, which are three feet thick; the smoke from them escaping through wooden louvres, or shutters, above. According to the direction from which the wind blew, these louvres were shut to on one or other of the four sides. The mechanical ingenuity of the age was at a low level, and was not able to contrive means by which these ventilators could be opened or shut from within; so we find a turret staircase leading up to the roof, around which runs an open-air passage for access to the louvres.