John Bateman’s celebrated digest of the 1873 Return of Owners of Land, recording both branches of the Lee-Warner family, of Walsingham Abbey and of Tyberton Court, among the landowners of late Victorian Britain.

The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland

Landownership Lee Warner Primary Source Tyberton Court Victorian Era Walsingham Abbey


John Bateman’s Great Landowners, first issued in 1876 and repeatedly revised, distilled the parliamentary Return of Owners of Land of 1873 into the standard reference on who owned Victorian Britain. Bateman listed every owner of substantial acreage with their seat and holdings, and his pages remain the quickest way to place a landed family at a fixed point in the late nineteenth century.

The Lee-Warners in Bateman

The 1878 edition records, at page 466, both branches of the family that had held the Manor of the Dungeon since 1680: “LEE-WARNER, Henry James, of Walsingham Abbey, Fakenham,” the senior line in Norfolk, and “LEE-WARNER, Robert Henry, of Tibberton Court, Hereford,” the branch descended from the Reverend Daniel Henry Lee Warner, with which the evidence places the Canterbury property. The entry fixes Robert Henry Lee-Warner at Tyberton in the year of Bateman’s survey, consistent with the census returns of 1881 and 1891 and with his presumptive tenure of the manor between 1858 and his death in 1895.

Source Details

Bateman, John. The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland. London: Harrison, 1878. Public domain. Available through the Internet Archive at archive.org/details/greatlandownerso00bate, from which the download above is served. A self-hosted copy will be added to this archive in due course.