Catalogue description FETHERSTON OF PACKWOOD

Deeds and papers relating to the Fetherston (later Fetherston Leigh) family of Packwood and their estates in Packwood and elsewhere.

The collection consists of sixty-two documents (mainly deeds) arranged chronologically, 1407-1849 (but including a modern translation of a Packwood deed, temp. Edward I) and a volume into which a further seventy-nine documents (many of them bonds and receipts) have been bound up. These range in date from 1613 to 1743.

Fetherston family of Packwood, Warwickshire

• Packwood, Warwickshire

The Fetherstons of Packwood first appear, in the fifteenth century, as yeomen but by the early seventeenth century had gravitated into the gentry. Their residence was Packwood House, acquired in 1599, and they bought up other nearby properties, in Knowle, Lapworth, Warwick and elsewhere, in the seventeenth century. On the death of Thomas Fetherston in 1720, the estates passed to his sister, Dorothy, who married Thomas Leigh. He assumed the name Fetherston Leigh. Their only daughter, Catherine, died unmarried in 1769, leaving Packwood to the husband of her half-sister, William Dilke of Maxstoke. He took the name Fetherston Dilke, as did his son and grandson. The next in line, who was known simply as John Fetherston, sold Packwood in 1869. For further details, see J.J. Belton, The Story of Packwood, 1951.

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