Alongside his twelve-volume survey of Kent, Edward Hasted published a dedicated two-volume history of Canterbury in 1801, treating the city’s civil and ecclesiastical history at a depth the county survey could not accommodate. For the Manor of the Dungeon it contains two passages of particular importance.
At page 221 of the first volume, Hasted describes the state of the manor at the close of the eighteenth century: the mansion, “situated just without the city walls, at a small distance westward from the lesser hill of the Dungeon, in the parish of St. Mary Bredin, has been pulled down for some years, and only part of the out-offices are remaining, with part of the garden walls.”
At page 313, in his account of St. Mary Bredin church, he records that the patronage of the church was granted in the thirty-eighth year of Henry VIII to “the Hales’s, lords of the manor of the Dungeon, whose burial place was within this church; since which the patronage of it has continued in the possession of the owners of that manor.” This sentence is the linchpin of the manor’s later history: it establishes the advowson of St. Mary Bredin as a proxy for the lordship itself, so that the recorded patrons and presentations of the parish trace the manor’s owners through periods when no deed of the manor survives in print.
Hasted, Edward. The History of the Ancient and Metropolitical City of Canterbury, Civil and Ecclesiastical. 2 volumes. Canterbury, 1801. Public domain. The first volume is available through the Internet Archive at archive.org/details/historyofancient01hast, from which the download above is served. A self-hosted copy will be added to this archive in due course.