Alveston Manor
English country house in Stratford-upon-Avon, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK
Alveston Manor is a predominantly Elizabethan building located on the northern edge of Stratford-upon-Avon's town centre. Currently it is known as the Macdonald Alveston Manor Hotel, which forms part of the Macdonald Hotels group. The building is reputed to be the site of the first performance of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and is a Grade II listed building.
Location
Alveston Manor is located in what was the Barlichway Hundred of Warwickshire County. It is located on Banbury Road, at the southern end of Clopton Bridge in Bridgetown, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Pre-Manor
An Anglo-Saxon cemetery, dating from the early 6th to early 7th centuries, was excavated on the site in 1934. More than a hundred burials were discovered, where the "high proportion of male burials with weapons [was] taken to indicate the presence of a warrior and social elite." Also found were "fine necklaces and exquisite broaches".
In 1970, while extending the hotel's carpark, an extensive Saxon burial ground was excavated, including six graves, the remains of four cremations, three other possible graves and nine skeletons, including that of a six-foot warrior buried in what was thought to be a unique way; with heavy planks on top of the skeleton. As part of the dig archaeologists used radioactive capsules for the first time in Britain to discover the age of the relics that they discovered including urns, pottery, shields, spears and broaches. The dig continued in 1971, with the hope of finding a settlement, but this did not materialise.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Alveston Manor” as english country house in Stratford-upon-Avon, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as english country house in Stratford-upon-Avon, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26570430. Authority coordinates are 52.190, -1.698. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1970 and 1971.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alveston Manor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.