W. H. Ireland’s county history of Kent, updating Hasted to the late 1820s and recording that the manorial estate of the Dungeon was by then ‘now known by the name of Deanjohn Farm,’ still in Lee Warner hands.

England's Topographer, or A New and Complete History of the County of Kent

Dane John Farm Kent History Lee Warner Manorial History Primary Source Topography


William Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a figure better remembered for his youthful Shakespeare forgeries than for his later, entirely respectable topographical labors, compiled a four-volume history of Kent published between 1828 and 1830, with engraved views by George Shepherd and Henry Gastineau. The work leans heavily on Hasted, as every Kent history of the period did, but its value for the Manor of the Dungeon lies precisely in what it updates.

The Manor in the 1820s

Ireland’s first volume carries the manor’s story a generation past Hasted. It confirms the descent through the Hales, Lee, and Lee Warner families, and records that the manorial estate in the parish of St. Mary Bredin was “now known by the name of Deanjohn Farm.” This is the earliest identification of the manor’s surviving physical form as a named working farm, the thread by which the lordship can be followed through the nineteenth-century record: the farm appears under the name Donjon Farm in the Tyberton Court muniments, and under the name Dane John Farm in Canterbury records as late as 1875.

Source Details

Ireland, W. H. England’s Topographer, or A New and Complete History of the County of Kent; from the Earliest Records to the Present Time. 4 volumes. London: G. Virtue, 1828-1830. Public domain. The first volume is available through the Internet Archive at archive.org/details/bib_fict_1036454_1, from which the download above is served. A self-hosted copy will be added to this archive in due course.