Lords of the Manor of the Dungeon
The documented succession—and where the record stops
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 an account of the historical holders and later candidates identified for the Manor of the Dungeon in Canterbury. It is not a continuous pedigree to the present. A family’s history, the ownership of a farm, and the descent of the particular lordship must be distinguished.
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 has a much earlier and separate archaeological history.
Essential distinction
The historical manor is well documented. Its later succession is not. The nineteenth-century links require proof, as does the proposed tenure of the later Lee-Warner candidates. The death of one candidate in 1944 is not the end of an otherwise proved chain. No instrument connecting that chain to the 2024 seller has been found.
See the evidence assessment →Documented Historical Succession
The entries in this section rest on named historical accounts, archival records, or transactions identified in those sources. That does not make every date equally certain, but it gives each entry an affirmative basis. Hasted’s narrative in particular remains a published antiquarian account, not a substitute for the original instruments at every transition.
Ernaldus de Chich
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.
Thomas Chiche
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.
John Chiche
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.
Thomas Chich
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.
Valentine Chich
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.
Roger Brent
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.
John Boteler, alias Butler, of Heronden in Eastry
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.
The Hales Family
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.
Elizabeth Hales and the Sheldon Connection
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.
Henry Lee
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.
Henry Lee Warner
Period: From 1734
Henry Lee’s son (1688-1760), of Nackington near Canterbury. He took the additional surname Warner on succeeding to the estates of the family of John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, and settled at Walsingham Abbey in Norfolk, beginning the family’s long connection with that county. The History of Parliament records him as Member for Canterbury and heir to “lands in six counties.”
Thomas Lee Warner
Period: To 1768
Of the same generation of the Lee Warner family. 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.
Henry Lee Warner of Walsingham Abbey
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, and Hasted records him as “the present owner of it.” In the 1820s the topographer W. H. Ireland noted that the manorial estate in St. Mary Bredin parish was “now known by the name of Deanjohn Farm,” still in Lee Warner hands.
Later Family Connections and Presumptive Succession
The following entries identify the family connections and candidates through which the later descent may be investigated. They do not extend the documented lordship into a continuous nineteenth- or twentieth-century chain. The periods given for the later candidates are proposed research ranges, not proved dates of tenure.
The Reverend Daniel Henry Lee Warner
Period: Early nineteenth century to 1858 (connection under investigation)
Daniel Henry Lee Warner (1775-1858) married Anne Brydges, co-heiress of Tyberton Court in Herefordshire. The project’s research ledger identifies leases of Donjon Farm, Canterbury, dated 1695 and 1814, among the Tyberton Court muniments at the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, A81/II/237–8. These remain catalogue leads: their parties, parcels, and operative wording need inspection. The 1814 date does not by itself establish Daniel Henry’s tenure as lord.
His son, the Reverend George Brydges Lee Warner (1812-1880), served as vicar of St. Mary Bredin, and the church’s spire was raised in 1881 as his memorial. This is a relevant family connection with Canterbury. It is not, without the presentation and property records, proof of the lordship’s descent. Hasted’s association of patronage with the manor’s owners cannot automatically be extended to every later generation.
Robert Henry Lee-Warner
Period: 1858–1895 (presumptive; not a proved tenure)
Of Tyberton Court, recorded there by the censuses of 1881 and 1891 and listed among the landowners of England in Bateman’s survey of 1878. He died at Cheltenham on 5 March 1895. These records make his estate worth investigating. No located conveyance or devise establishes his acquisition of the Dungeon lordship, and the absence of a discovered sale out of the family does not prove that he inherited it.
Major Chandos Brydges Lee-Warner
Period: 1895–1944 (presumptive; not a proved tenure)
The later Lee-Warner of Tyberton Court (1863-1944). He married Lady Dorothea Augusta FitzClarence, a descendant of King William IV, in 1899, and died on 1 October 1944; Tyberton Court was demolished in 1952. He remains a candidate for investigation in the proposed family succession, not a proved holder of the Dungeon. His probate and residuary-estate records may supply evidence, but the inquiry cannot assume that the lordship was among his assets.
The Later Descent: An Open Question
Period: Nineteenth century to the present
No complete chain through the later Lee-Warner candidates has been assembled for this project. The inquiry therefore begins before 1944, not just after the death of Major Lee-Warner. Wills, settlements, conveyances, and their property schedules need to establish both the property held and the person to whom it passed.
The lordship may have followed a family devise, an estate sale, or a separate assignment. A family recollection of an insurance-company connection remains unsupported by a located document. The research ledger records the next inquiries. Evidence of farm ownership or church patronage is useful, but cannot stand in for a transfer of the lordship itself: HM Land Registry’s Practice Guide 22 distinguishes lordship, manorial land, and manorial rights.
The land inside the walls, meanwhile, followed its own civic history, becoming the public gardens. The survival or ownership of a building outside the walls likewise does not settle the lordship’s descent.
The 2024 Possessory-Title Instruments
Date: 11 March 2024
Manorial Title Register Limited executed documents assigning to James P. Howard, II, for £175, what the company described as the incorporeal possessory title of Lord of the Manor of the Dungeon in the parish of St. Mary Bredin, Kent. Those instruments establish the terms of the transaction and the assertions made by the seller. They do not, by themselves, supply the missing chain from the Lee-Warner family or prove that the seller had acquired the historical lordship.
Howard uses the phrase in connection with this documentary project, while making the instruments and their limitation public. The complete 2024 file is available in the archive.
A Note on Sources
The historical account draws primarily on Edward Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (Volume 11, 1800) and his History of the Ancient and Metropolitical City of Canterbury (1801), both represented in the archive, for the medieval through eighteenth-century periods. The later discussion uses W. H. Ireland’s England’s Topographer (1828-1830), the History of Parliament, Bateman’s Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1878), census returns, and archival catalogue leads. The catalogue leads include the Donjon Farm leases among the Tyberton Court muniments and the Lee Warner papers at the Norfolk Record Office; they are not represented as inspected instruments of transfer.
The October 2026 research note records the clarification of the later entries. Anyone with documentary evidence bearing on the manor’s descent, particularly in the nineteenth century and after, is invited to make contact through this site.