High Street (east): No. 115 (Wysdom Hall)

Behind the Georgian façade is one of the most important medieval houses in Burford. Around a narrow courtyard are jettied structures from the 15th and 16th centuries. One room has panelling of 1555, with the initials of the prominent merchant and townsman Simon Wisdom (died 1586 or 1587), who almost certainly lived here. Later owners included Hugh May, gent (late 16th century), and members of the Bartholomew family, whose tenant in 1685 was a mercer, Francis Keble. The grand façade dates from around 1720, when Richard Whitehall, another mercer, bought the house. Its symmetry hides some of the earlier structure: a second floor cuts across the tops of the two windows to the left, though the elongated sash windows to the right light a full-height room. From the central doorway a passageway led, until the mid 20th century, to the courtyard. The junction with No. 117 next door (once also owned by Wisdom) is complex, a variant on Burford's many 'flying freeholds'. The roof extends over both properties, and part of No. 115 lies behind No. 117. The bowed shop fronts are probably not original to the front.

The building housed a mercer's business in 1805 and possibly for much of the 18th century. In the 1840s–50s it was a grocer's, and from 1861 to 1887 it was owned by John and Philip Hollowell, cabinet makers. A barn-like building at the rear, with 19th-century windows, was probably their workshop, and from 1887 to the early 20th century was used as a mattress factory and cobbler's shop by the Sharp family (successors to the Hollowells), who were boot, furniture, and china dealers. Faded painted signs to the street, in the house's central doorway, read 'Funerals Furnish'd', a common side-line for cabinet makers or upholsterers. In 1935 the house was sold to Marjorie Warner, whose son Roger ran an antiques business there until 1986. An antique shop continued in 2007, though the house was separately occupied.

See: N Pevsner, Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (1974), 515; RH Gretton, The Burford Records (1920), 402, 445, 463; RM; R Warner, 'Memoirs of a Twentieth-Century Antique Dealer', Regional Furniture 17 (2003), 1–175