When the heirs of George Sheldon alienated the Dungeon in 1680, the manor passed into a family whose tenure would prove longer than the Hales connection it replaced, and far more obscure. The Lees, and the Lee Warners after them, held the manor for at least a century and a half, and quite possibly for more than two and a half centuries. Yet because the family’s center of gravity drifted first to Norfolk and then to Herefordshire, the manor slipped out of the printed record almost entirely. Tracing what became of it is the central open problem in the manor’s history, and this page sets out what is currently known.
The purchaser of 1680 was Henry Lee, esquire (c. 1657-1734), a Canterbury alderman who sat as Member of Parliament for the city and whose entry in the History of Parliament describes him as “of Dane John, nr. Canterbury.” Lee resided at the property and rebuilt the family’s fortunes around it. Through his marriage the family came into the estates of the Warners, the family of John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, and Lee’s son Henry took the additional surname Warner as a condition of that inheritance, becoming Henry Lee Warner (1688-1760), of Nackington near Canterbury and later of Walsingham Abbey in Norfolk.
The Walsingham inheritance changed the family’s relationship to Canterbury. The Lee Warners became Norfolk gentry, and the Dungeon became a distant holding administered through tenants. The mansion house, by then called Donjon alias the Coventry House, was demolished in 1752 by Thomas Lee Warner, who died possessed of the estate in
Two details in Hasted repay attention. First, in his separate history of Canterbury published in 1801, Hasted noted that the advowson of St. Mary Bredin, the right to appoint the parish’s vicar, had been granted to the Haleses as lords of the manor in the reign of Henry VIII, “since which the patronage of it has continued in the possession of the owners of that manor.” The patronage of St. Mary Bredin is therefore a proxy for the lordship itself: whoever presented the vicar held, or held under, the manor. Second, by the 1820s the topographer W. H. Ireland could describe the manorial estate as “now known by the name of Deanjohn Farm,” fixing the manor’s surviving physical form as a working farm in St. Mary Bredin parish, distinct from the Dane John field inside the walls that the city had owned since the sixteenth century and made into the public gardens.
In the early nineteenth century the Lee Warner interests divided. The senior line remained at Walsingham Abbey, where the estate passed in 1921, through a Lee Warner mother, to the Gurney family, whose descendants hold it still. The Kent property went another way. The Reverend Daniel Henry Lee Warner (1775-1858) married Anne Brydges, co-heiress of Tyberton Court in Herefordshire, and established a branch of the family there. The evidence that the Canterbury estate followed this branch is archival: among the Tyberton muniments now held at the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre are leases of “Donjon Farm, Canterbury” dated 1695 and 1814, the kind of deeds that travel with ownership. The 1814 lease falls squarely within Daniel Henry Lee Warner’s tenure.
The advowson evidence points the same way. The Reverend George Brydges Lee Warner (1812-1880), a son of the Tyberton house who lived at Canterbury, served as vicar of St. Mary Bredin, the family presenting a son to the family living exactly as the manor’s history would predict. When the rebuilt church added its spire in 1881, the parishioners raised it as his memorial.
From Daniel Henry Lee Warner the Tyberton estate passed to Robert Henry Lee-Warner (1823-1895), recorded at Tyberton Court in the censuses of 1881 and 1891 and in Bateman’s survey of the great landowners of Britain in 1878, and from him to Major Chandos Brydges Lee-Warner (1863-1944), who married Lady Dorothea Augusta FitzClarence, a descendant of King William IV, in 1899. Major Lee-Warner died in 1944; Tyberton Court itself was demolished in 1952. On the current state of the evidence, he is the last person who can plausibly be identified as heir to the genuine lordship of the Manor of the Dungeon.
No conveyance of the manor or lordship after the early nineteenth century has yet been found in any public catalogue. That silence admits of several explanations. The lordship may simply have descended, unremarked, through the Lee-Warner family and into the residuary estates of its twentieth-century heirs, where it would technically remain today. It may have passed silently with a sale of Dane John Farm, as manorial titles often did when an estate’s land was sold. Or it may have been extinguished in practice by simple neglect, a possibility the law of incorporeal hereditaments does not formally recognize but which describes the practical fate of many urban manors.
A family recollection suggests the manor may have passed to an insurance company around the turn of the twentieth century, a fate that befell many encumbered estates during the agricultural depression of the 1880s and 1890s, when the great assurance societies foreclosed their way into substantial landholdings. No documentary support for this has yet been found, but the tests that would settle it are known: the field books of the 1910 Inland Revenue valuation, which record the owner of every property in England including Dane John Farm; the probate records of the four documented Lee Warner generations between 1858 and 1944; and the estate sale notices of the Kentish newspapers. Research on all three fronts is ongoing, and this page will be updated as results come in.