The lordship of a manor in English law was a form of property, and like any form of property it passed from hand to hand through inheritance, sale, forfeiture, and the accumulated accidents of time. What follows is the most complete account currently assemblable of those who held the lordship of the Manor of the Dungeon in Canterbury, from the earliest documented holders to the present. Where the record is clear, it is stated as such. Where there are gaps, those gaps are acknowledged.
The manor takes its full formal name from its location in the parish of St. Mary Bredin in the city of Canterbury, in the County of Kent. The mound from which it takes its common name predates the documented lordship by what may be a thousand years or more.
Period: Reigns of Henry II, Richard I, and King John (c. 1154 to c. 1216)
The earliest documented lord of the manor. Described by Hasted as a person of principal note in three successive reigns, Ernaldus de Chich held the aldermanries of Burgate and Northgate in Canterbury as an hereditary estate. The manor was among his properties and continued in his family after him.
Period: Active 1259, 1271
Documented as bailiff of Canterbury in 1259 and again in 1271. Recorded as a principal benefactor to St. Mary Bredin, the parish church immediately adjacent to the manor.
Period: Active 1320 and c. 1349-1352
A John Chiche is documented as lord of the manor in 1320, when a definitive sentence was pronounced by the commissary of Canterbury establishing the hospital of St. Laurence’s entitlement to tithes from the manor and adjacent lands. Another John Chich, likely a descendant, held the office of bailiff of Canterbury in the twenty-third and twenty-sixth years of the reign of King Edward III, corresponding to 1349 and 1352, the years immediately following the Black Death’s first visitation to Canterbury.
Period: c. 1391-1392
Son of the above-mentioned John, Thomas Chich served as sheriff of Kent in the fifteenth year of the reign of King Richard II and kept his shrievalty at the Dungeon, indicating the manor was then functioning as the family’s principal residence and administrative seat.
Period: Active mid-fifteenth century; alienated the manor c. 1461
Thomas’s great-grandson. Valentine Chich died without male issue and alienated the manor around the beginning of Edward IV’s reign, ending more than two centuries of Chiche family tenure at the Dungeon.
Period: c. 1461-1486
Gentleman, of the parish of All Saints in Canterbury. Acquired the manor from Valentine Chich around 1461. Died possessed of it in 1486, in the second year of Henry VII’s reign, having directed by his will that it be sold for the payment of his debts and legacies.
Period: Early reign of Henry VIII (c. 1510s)
An old court-roll establishes that at the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, John Boteler or Butler of Heronden in Eastry had become proprietor of the manor. He subsequently sold it.
Period: c. 1520s to 1680
John Boteler passed the manor by sale to Sir John Hales, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. When the antiquary John Leland visited this part of Kent in the thirtieth year of Henry VIII’s reign (c. 1538-1539), a Hales was then resident at the mansion. The manor descended through the Hales family over the subsequent century and more, during which time Sir James Hales, Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, held the Dungeon as his family’s seat; his death in 1554 and the landmark legal case Hales v. Petit that followed are the most widely remembered events in the manor’s history. The estate descended further to Sir James Hales of the Dungeon, who died in 1665 leaving one only daughter and heir, Elizabeth.
Period: 1665-1680
Elizabeth Hales carried the manor in marriage, first to Sir Stephen Hales of Warwickshire and secondly to George Sheldon, third son of William Sheldon of Beoly in Worcestershire. She died at the Dungeon in 1678, and her husband George Sheldon died a few months afterwards. His heirs alienated the estate in 1680.
Period: 1680-1734
Henry Lee, esquire, later alderman and Member of Parliament for Canterbury, acquired the manor from the Sheldon heirs in 1680. He resided at the property, known by this period by the name Dunjeen or Dane John. He died in September 1734.
Period: 1734-1768
Henry Lee’s descendant. In 1752, Thomas Lee Warner pulled down to the ground the mansion house of the Dungeon, then known as Donjon, alias the Coventryhouse (so called from Lady Coventry’s having resided in it), leaving only a few of the offices in the front and the garden walls standing, together with the farmhouse and buildings adjacent. He died possessed of the estate in 1768.
Period: From 1768
Henry Lee Warner, of Walsingham Abbey in Norfolk, succeeded his father Thomas Lee Warner in the estate. He was the owner at the time Edward Hasted wrote his History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent around 1800.
Period: Late eighteenth century onward
In 1790, Alderman James Simmons took a lease on the Dane John from the Mayor and Commonalty of Canterbury, transforming the former manorial ground into a public garden. In 1796 he returned it to the city following a dispute. Since 1803, when a Burghmote committee was formed to manage the gardens, the land has been held in public trust and administered by the successor municipal authority. The manorial lordship, as distinct from the land itself, became dormant.
From: 11 March 2024
By conveyance from Manorial Title Register Limited, James Patrick Howard, II, of Columbia, Maryland, acquired the incorporeal possessory title of Lord of the Manor of the Dungeon in the Parish of St. Mary Bredin in the County of Kent. The relevant instruments of conveyance are preserved in the archives of this site.
The documented history above draws primarily on Edward Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (Volume 11, 1800), available through British History Online, for the medieval through eighteenth-century periods. Hasted’s full account of the manor extends from the Chiche family through Henry Lee Warner and provides the most complete narrative of documented ownership. Anyone with documentary evidence bearing on the periods not covered by Hasted is invited to make contact through this site.