Lords of the Manor
Chronological Listing
Main Source: C E Johnston THE EARLY HISTORY OF LITTLE BERKHAMSTEAD; THE LATER HISTORY OF LITTLE BERKHAMSTEAD (see those articles for more complete details).
The Domesday Book recorded that before the Conquest in 1066 the Manor of Berkhamstead (sic) had belonged to King Edward the Confessor and all the kings his predecessors. (Note that there was no mention in Domesday of the adjective “Little” before the name of the village).
After the conquest, as with almost all of the estates in England, it was bestowed by William on one of his followers, Harduin d’Eschalers, and the list from then on is as follows:
1066–1223 The d’Eschalers family
*1223 - August 25, 1224 Falkes de Breauté
1225 The Crown
1226 John Marescall
1228 Nicholas de Moaeles
1337/47 William de Botreaux
1402 John Norbury
1466 Sir John Say
1529 Lord Mountjoy
1539 Anthony Denny
*1600 Humphrey Weld
*1610 John Weld
1645 Phineas Andrews
1655 George Nevill
*1679 Elizabeth Fleetwood (née Nevill)
1713 John Dimsdale the younger
*1726 Thomas Dimsdale
Thomas Dimsdale afterwards became 1st Baron Dimsdale (of Imperial Russia) with whose family the manorial rights still remain (that would have been in 1911, when the second of Charles Johnston’s articles on the HISTORY OF LITTLE BERKHAMSTEAD was published in THE HOME COUNTIES MAGAZINE, VOLUME XIII).
More information of Lords of the Manor of special interest, as marked* above, is shown in separate articles.