Reference
V434-474
Title
Deeds of an estate at Marston Mortaine purchased by John Foster at the end of the 18th century.
Scope and Content
Nothing is known of the early history of this manor; for details of it’s history from 1550 see CRT130 Marston 3. In 1699 the manor was purchased from the trustees of the will of George Stoughton by William Pryor of Clifton Reynes, Buckinghamshire. Over the following 32 years Pryor made several purchases of land in the parish to add to his estate.
On the death of William Pryor in 1733 the estate passed to his grandson and heir William, who in 1742 mortgaged much of the estate acquired by his grandfather and in the following year added to the mortgage the manor and the remaining estates. In 1746 the estate was purchased for the sum of £3,350 by the mortgagee, Robert Chrichton. [V459]. On his death in 1748 it passed to trustees to provide a life annuity for the testator’s daughter, Jane Buchanan and to be sold or mortgaged on her death to raise funds for division amongst her children. Jane died in 1782 and the estate was purchased by her daughter, Dame Jane Riddell who sold it ten years later to John Foster of Birstal, Yorkshire. (later of Brickhill House, Bedford), the agriculturist. Foster appears throughout the land tax as the owner of the estate; he died in 1831 and must have left the estate to his eldest daughter Margaret, the wife of the Reverend Maurice Farrell, rector of Woughton, Buckinghamshire who appears as the owner on two maps of the parish in 1837 and 1840, [X1/22/3 and MAT31].
Many of the field names marked on the 1837 map correspond with those listed in the deed V471 (1792) although of course some alterations had taken place between the dates of the two documents at the Enclosure of the parish in 1809.
A list of landowners in the county for 1863 gives the Reverend Maurice Farrell of Woughton as the owner of an estate in Bedfordshire of 255 acres, the acreage of the Marston estate as given in X1/22/2. Nothing is known of the more recent history of the estate; the Reverend Farrell was still alive in 1877 (see Directory of Buckinghamshire 1877) and it appears from the biographical dictionary of the University of Oxford (Alumni Oxiensis) that he had a son, Maurice Foster Farrell (born 1839); barrister at law, Middle Temple 1864) who might possibly have inherited the estate on his father’s death.
[For other details and extracts relating to the manor see CRT Marston 3 on which this introduction is partly based.]
Level of description
sub-fonds