Recent questions on a FaceBook Page [*] prompted me to add some clarification about the origin of the Aldershot Park estate and its relation to so-called Manor House.
In brief:
TRUE: the Tichborne family owned the freehold estate of Aldershot Park and several other copyhold lands.
BUT: the Tichbornes neither owned nor built the house in what we call Manor Park.
The following is heavily condensed from two papers drafted in 2023. One appeared as an article which was first issued in Destinations, the house magazine for the Society of One Place Studies. It is available for download here. The other, co-written with Sally Jenkinson and as yet unpublished, has citations to wills, tax records and to manuscripts held at Hampshire Record Office to establish the descent of property. This ‘pre-print’ can be downloaded for inspection here.
Crondal/Crondall/Crundel
The history of Aldershot starts with the history of the Hundred of Crondal, within which Aldershot was a tithing. Listed in the will of Alfred in AD 875, Crondal was family possession to be passed to the eldest of his nephews. However, at Alfred’s death, the younger nephew rebelled, with nothing definitive found about the fate of his older brother nor of who inherited Crondal. The estate somehow came into the possession of the Winchester Bishop, later bequeathed to support the monks of the Cathedral Monastery – later renamed the Priory and Convent of St Swithun. Formal ownership by the Prior survived the Norman Conquest, although kings and bishops sometimes rode roughshod.
Cultivated land in Aldershot was occupied as ‘copyhold’ by tenants of the Prior. They attended courts at which records were kept of all land transfers, whether by inheritance, purchase or mortgage. The largest of those copyhold properties in Aldershot was a two-virgate estate, about which more later.
Aldershot Park as Freehold Estate
Aldershot Park owes its origin as one of the parks and lodges which served the royal hunting chase established for Henry II in 1154. Bought from the Crown by the Bishop of Winchester (who owned the nearby Hundred of Farnham), the Aldershot Park estate later came into the possession of the Moneye family. The monastic accounts kept for the Prior, circa 1260s, refer to 52 acres being ‘freely held’ as a result of royal charter by Peter de Moneta (Peter Money).
Fast forward almost 300 years, and John Aubrey makes reference in 1511 to “My manor of Aldershot in the counties of Southampton and Surrey.” Two years later, his nephew sells land at Runfold and Tongham and his manor of Aldershot to Robert Whyte, a Farnham merchant, and Katherine his wife. This highlights that the estate extended either side of the Blackwater. It also highlights ambiguity in the phrase ‘My manor’, the Prior continuing to be the Lord of the Manor and Hundred of Crondal, of which Aldershot was but a tithing.
Jumping ahead to 1567, the Crondal Customary sets out who owns what in each of the tithings in Crondal. Sir John White, the son of Robert and Katherine, is recorded as the owner of the freehold estate. He and his son Robert had additional copyhold property. He had also purchased the 31 acres which had been held by Waverley Abbey until it was dissolved in 1536.
When Sir John’s son Robert died in 1599, the estate passed to two daughters, Ellen and Mary, both remembered in marble, in the Church of St Michael the Archangel, with the name Tichborne, the sisters having married the two eldest sons of Benjamin Tichborne. Descending from an ancient family in Hampshire, he was a ‘quiet Catholic’ who who had used his position as Sheriff of Hampshire to arrange that James Stuart VI of Scots was promptly declared King James of England at Winchester in 1603. He was made a baronet, both his sons also being knighted. Richard, the eldest of the Tichborne brothers, inherited the title of baronet and moved to the family seat at Tichborne Park. His brother Walter and family remained, his eldest son inheriting the Aldershot estate via his mother Mary. On the wrong side of history after the Stuarts, the estate then stayed with the junior branch of the Tichborne family until sold in 1723; the family fortunes had declined, as had their mansion in Aldershot Park.
Ownership then passed along male and female lines across the families of Forbes, Fisher and Penyston before the freehold estate of Aldershot Park and Grange Farm in Tongham were sold, circa 1819, to Stephen Boyce of Covent Garden. At his death, it passed via his wife as a gift to her son Charles Barron the Younger, a land proprietor from London. Barron built a splendid mansion in Italianate style within Aldershot Park in 1842, the estate recorded in the Tithe Apportionment Survey at just under 210 acres. Having served thereafter as churchwarden and assumed the chair of the Vestry, Barron played the leading role from 1853 in negotiations about the sale of Commoners’ rights to the Government to establish the Camp. He died in 1859, his son selling the estate to John Back. Fast forward across two subsequent owners and the estate was bought in 1920 by the Urban District Council. In later years, the land would be used to host the Lido, the Crematorium and Aldershot Park Primary School.
The Manor House Confection
In 1920, the Urban District Council also bought the so-called Manor House and its land, intending to establish “the People’s Park.”
Two years later, in June 1922, the newly established Municipal Borough of Aldershot held its Charter Day there, referring to it as Manor Park. A Supplement in the Aldershot News made much of the reference in the Victoria History of Hampshire (Page, 1911) about two important houses called Aldershot Manor and Aldershot Place. The story told in that newspaper coverage contained errors and conjectures which have come to be repeated, sometimes verbatim, in later secondary material. Some inaccuracies are relatively unimportant, such as reference to Captain G. Newcome R.N. [he had instead retired as Captain in the 47th Regiment of Foot] and confusion between Thomas Buddle and a Mr Buckle. What is of greater significance is the erroneous assertion that the so-called ‘Manor House’ was built and occupied by the Tichborne family.
The start, by way of correction, is found in the Crondall Customary of 1567, reproduced in The Crondall Records (Baigent, 1891). Quite separately from the freehold property of Sir John White, this records ‘a capital messuage garden and orchard and two virgates of land’ as copyhold of John Faunteleroy. This is the same half a hide of land containing 63.5 acres (the equivalent of two virgates) which can be traced back as copyhold of Warren de Aula, circa 1260s.
The 1567 Customary also records that John Faunteleroy held seven additional properties with subtenants known as halimote tenants. (Two others in Aldershot also had ‘halimote’ sub-tenants: Katherine Cowper and William Aparke.). There is implication of some form of devolved authority within the tithing of Aldershot, the ‘atte Hall’ family in possession of the copyhold for at least the period 1351 to 1431.
Proof was found in the entries in the Crondal Court Rolls in which is recorded all property transfers. The descent of ownership of this two-virgate estate can be traced to the Faunteleroy family by 1535 and then down the centuries, variously inherited and sold. It was, for example, bought by Charles Viner in 1704 and sold by him in 1720. These years coincide with years in which the Tichborne family had ownership of the freehold Aldershot Park estate, not the owners nor occupiers of the two-virgate estate.
From 1720 to c.1790, the two-virgate copyhold property was with the extended family of Bagnall, Pole, Clarke and Price, passing along female as well as male lines. It was bought by Thomas Buddle, a mercer from Farnham, in 1793, then inherited in 1808 by his nephew John Eggar.
Tax records reveal the changes in naming. The mansion in the park land of that estate was listed as the ‘great House’ in the 1832 Land Tax return and as ‘Halimote House’ in the 1839 Rate Book.
The switch to ‘Manor House’ was a confection used by John Eggar when he first put the property up for sale, in 1835. The advertisement stated that it was “a very desirable property known as Aldershot Halimote, Manor House and Estate, adjoining the village, residence known as the Manor House, in midst of Park like grounds …”
Eggar finally managed to sell in 1841/2. Curiously, he separately passed the title of Aldershot Halimote to his younger brother Samuel Eggar of Bentley.
By 1851, with Captain Newcome recorded as a subsequent owner-occupier, the change in name to Manor House was already well established, then to be accepted in the public mind as the Camp opened in 1855 and the garrison town began to emerge.
It must be admitted that the story told in the 1922 Supplement of the Aldershot News was plausible, made more so by ambiguities in the Victoria County History of Hampshire and by the presence close by of memorials of the Tichborne family amongst the marbles within the nearby Church of St Michael the Archangel. But this was newspaper reportage and what seems plausible is not always so.
Regrettably, those mistakes were repeated and made concrete in The Story of Aldershot (Cole 1951; Cole 1980), works we all look to as the standard reference. However, many years have passed since and the key primary sources are now easier to access, enabling this correction to the story we tell of ourselves.
* The FaceBook page is called Historic Aldershot Military Town
