The poor old rich. For centuries they lived in their huge houses — “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” (to quote Cecil Alexander’s All Things Bright and Beautiful) — and then, quite suddenly, many found themselves out on their ear, victims of a tax destined to change Britain’s social scene for ever: death duties.

Interestingly, the two chancellors of the exchequer most associated with the introduction and manipulation of the tax — William Harcourt in his Liberal budget of 1894 and Winston Churchill in his Conservative one of 1925 (in which he also, incidentally, imposed Motor Excise Duty for the first time) — were scions of Oxfordshire mansions (at Blenheim and Nuneham Courtenay), in both of which much spluttering over the breakfast snipe on toast must surely have occurred.

Churchill, who increased death duty as a means of differentiating between earned and unearned income, argued that the the tax was “a certain corrective against the development of a race of idle rich”; and Harcourt (1827-1904), who initiated the tax in the first place at a paltry eight per cent on estates worth over £1m, saw it as a means of raising revenue in order to lower income tax.

But such was the entrenchment of the established order of things, as depicted for instance in the novels of Trollope, that in Harcourt’s day even prominent Liberals were apprehensive of the tax. Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, for example, suggested that some sort of relief should be granted to estates in which two members of the same family died in quick succession —but Harcourt, known to his friends and enemies alike as ‘Jumbo’, on account of his bulk, would have none of it. He believed that bequests stifled individual enterprise.

As fate would have it, Harcourt’s own family was one of the first to take just such a double hit. As a younger son he stood little chance of inheriting Nuneham Park, but then — irony of ironies and thanks to the sudden death of his elder brother’s son in 1904, he did — only to expire himself six months later; thereby of course incurring another helping of his own tax.

By yet another quirk of fate, though, his son and heir had married a niece of someone who had shown just the kind of economic enterprise he admired —namely the American financier J. P. Morgan — who gave the young couple enough money to keep and even restore the house and park.

What villagers in Nuneham Courtenay thought of all this is not known (at least by me), but death duties — which reached 60 per cent by the beginning of the Second World War — were as popular with poorer people, not of course personally affected, as they were unpopular with the well-off, who were.

And it does seem like poetic justice that the tax should strike twice in one year on the descendants of a man who had treated villagers with such sublime arrogance in the 18th century as to remove them from their cottages in order to improve the view around his house.

The first Earl Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt (1714-1777) famously demolished the old village of Nuneham Courtenay in 1761 and rebuilt it with the uniform (but beautiful) cottages that now line the A4074 Oxford-Henley road. “Have we not seen at pleasure’s call/The smiling long-frequented village fall?” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village, almost certainly with Nuneham Courtenay in mind.

The earl’s grandfather, who had been Queen Anne’s chancellor, had bought the manor of Nuneham (then spelled Newnham) as an investment, and the earl — who according to Walpole was “a marvel of pomposity and propriety” — decided to leave his other houses at Stanton Harcourt and at Cokethorpe, in order to build a Palladian house exactly where the old village stood. Only one old widow, Babs Wyatt, was allowed to live out the rest of her life in her old cottage. The second earl even put up an inscription near the site of her home after her death — so that cultivated visitors could “bow the knee” to her “unlettered memory”.

Despite death duties, the Harcourts owned Nuneham Park until the mid 1950s when they sold it to Oxford University. Now it is a retreat centre for a new religious movement of Indian origin.

During the Second World War it was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence as a photographic reconnaissance interpretation unit where photographs of enemy territory, taken by officers stationed at RAF Benson, were analysed.