The earliest lords of the Manor of the Dungeon whose names survive in the historical record were the Chiche family of Canterbury, documented from the reign of Henry II through the mid-fifteenth century. Merchants, civic officials, and landowners of substantial standing, they held the manor for more than two hundred and fifty years, leaving traces in the tithes records of St. Lawrence’s Hospital, the bailiff rolls of the city, and the parish of St. Mary Bredin that bore the manor’s name. The principal source for their history is Edward Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, which preserves the manorial descent in unusual detail for a property of this size.
The earliest member of the family to appear in the documentary record is Ernaldus de Chich, described by Hasted as a person of “principal note” in the reigns of Henry II, Richard I, and King John, spanning roughly the period from 1154 to 1216. His prominence through three successive reigns suggests sustained standing rather than a transient figure, and his principal assets were substantial: the aldermanries of Burgate and Northgate, two of Canterbury’s significant administrative wards, were held by him and his heirs as an estate in fee.
The surname “de Chich” indicates a Norman-era place association, likely with the village of Chich, now St. Osyth, in Essex, though whether Ernaldus originated there or derived his name from some other connection is not established by the surviving record.
Thomas Chiche appears in the civic records as bailiff of Canterbury in 1259 and again in 1271. The office of bailiff carried real executive authority in a city of Canterbury’s importance; a man who held it twice, across more than a decade, had demonstrated reliability and standing.
Hasted also identifies Thomas as a principal benefactor to St. Mary Bredin, the parish church that gave the manor its full formal name. The connection between the Chiche family and St. Mary Bredin was clearly more than geographical: they invested in the church materially, and it served as their parish throughout their tenure at the Dungeon.
A John Chiche appears in 1320, during the thirteenth year of Edward II’s reign, when a definitive sentence was pronounced by Robert Malling, commissary of Canterbury, establishing that the hospital of St. Laurence in Canterbury was entitled to receive the tithes of the manor and of three hundred acres of adjacent land. In consideration of this, John Chiche, then lord of the manor, was to receive from the hospital in autumn a modest render: five loaves of bread, two pitchers and a half of beer, and half a cheese of fourpence, together with a pair of leather gloves and a pound of wax in candles for himself and three pairs of gloves for his servants. The tithes settlement locates the manor within the web of Canterbury’s ecclesiastical institutions and provides a specific document dating the family’s tenure.
A John Chich also appears as bailiff of Canterbury in the twenty-third and twenty-sixth years of Edward III, corresponding to 1349 and 1352, the years immediately following the Black Death’s first visitation to Canterbury.
Thomas Chich, son of the above-mentioned John, served as sheriff of Kent in the fifteenth year of King Richard II’s reign, approximately 1391 to 1392. Hasted records that he kept his shrievalty at the Dungeon, meaning the manor served as his official residence during his term as the king’s chief representative in the county. Sheriff of Kent was a position of real consequence: the sheriff administered royal justice, collected royal revenue, and commanded the county’s military resources when called upon. That Thomas kept his shrievalty at the Dungeon says something both about the manor’s standing and about the family’s continued prominence in Kentish affairs two generations after the Black Death.
Thomas’s great-grandson Valentine Chich ended the family’s long association with the manor. Valentine died without male issue, and accordingly alienated the manor around the beginning of Edward IV’s reign, approximately 1461. The Chiche family had held the Dungeon for the better part of three centuries.
Valentine’s disposal of the estate to Roger Brent, a gentleman of the parish of All Saints in Canterbury, closed the chapter of Chiche ownership and opened the next phase of the manor’s history.
Throughout the Chiche family’s tenure, the church of St. Mary Bredin remained the ecclesiastical center of the manor’s life. Thomas Chiche’s benefactions to it in the thirteenth century, the tithes dispute of 1320 involving the hospital of St. Laurence, and the family’s presence in the parish over multiple generations all testify to a close relationship between the family and the church. The parish records of St. Mary Bredin, which survive in the Canterbury Cathedral Archives, represent one of the most promising unexamined sources for further research into the Chiche family and their role at the Dungeon.
Roger Brent died possessed of the manor in 1486, having directed its sale to meet his debts. His estate passed to John Boteler, or Butler, of Heronden in Eastry, who in the early reign of Henry VIII sold it to Sir John Hales, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. The transition from the Chiche family to the Hales family thus ran through at least two intermediate holders and spans roughly the period from 1461 to the 1510s or 1520s, with the documentation for Roger Brent and John Boteler relatively secure and the precise dates of each transfer not fully established.