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: 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.”
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.
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.
Period: Early nineteenth century to 1858
With Daniel Henry Lee Warner (1775-1858) the Kent property followed a new branch of the family. He married Anne Brydges, co-heiress of Tyberton Court in Herefordshire, and the muniments of that house, now in the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, include leases of “Donjon Farm, Canterbury” of 1695 and 1814, deeds of the kind that travel with ownership. The 1814 lease falls within his tenure. The family’s continued hold on the manor’s advowson, which Hasted records as running with the lordship since the reign of Henry VIII, is confirmed by the presentation of his son, the Reverend George Brydges Lee Warner (1812-1880), as vicar of St. Mary Bredin; the church’s spire was raised in 1881 as that vicar’s memorial.
Period: 1858-1895 (presumptive)
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. No conveyance of the Canterbury manor out of the family during his tenure has been found, and he is therefore its presumptive lord for this period.
Period: 1895-1944 (presumptive)
The last of the Lee-Warners 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. On the present 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, which, absent any later conveyance, would have passed into his estate and to his descendants.
Period: 1944 to the present
No sale, devise, or other disposition of the lordship after the nineteenth century has yet been found. The lordship may remain, unrecognized, in the residuary estates of the Lee-Warner heirs; it may have passed silently with a sale of Dane John Farm; a family recollection, so far unsupported by any document, suggests it may have been absorbed by an insurance company around the turn of the twentieth century, as happened to many encumbered estates in that era. Research in the probate records, the 1910 Inland Revenue valuation, and the Kentish newspapers is ongoing. The land inside the walls, meanwhile, followed its own path: city property since the sixteenth century, made into a public garden from 1790, and administered by the municipal authority ever since.
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) and his History of the Ancient and Metropolitical City of Canterbury (1801), both available through British History Online and the Internet Archive, for the medieval through eighteenth-century periods. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century entries rest on 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 catalogues, principally the leases of Donjon Farm among the Tyberton Court muniments at the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre (A81/II/237-8) and the Lee Warner papers at the Norfolk Record Office. Entries marked presumptive rest on the absence of any recorded alienation rather than on a positive document, and are stated as such. Anyone with documentary evidence bearing on the manor’s descent, particularly after 1858, is invited to make contact through this site.