The Pastons of Horton and the Horton Court Library

The manor house of Horton Court, about three miles from Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire, was a focus of Catholicism when occupied in the eighteenth century by a recusant branch of the Paston family. The present writer's interest in its past has recently been kindled by the discovery that its library, whose catalogue survives, though the books have long been dispersed, contains many books by, or closely associated with, English Catholics of the penal times. One of the collections that went from it had probably been put together by Dr Edward Paston, a distinguished President of the English College at Douai, who died in 1714.