Little Gatcombe

Parish of Wymering, Hampshire

The Manor

Little Gatcombe is an English manorial lordship in the Parish of Wymering, Hampshire, now within the city of Portsmouth. The manor has been documented since the thirteenth century, when the lords of Gatcombe held their land by grand serjeanty from the Crown, owing armed military service at Portchester Castle in time of war. The lordship is an incorporeal hereditament: a form of intangible property recognised in English law, distinct from the land itself and from any buildings upon it.

Origin

The manor takes its name from "Gatcombe", meaning "goat valley" in Old English. Little Gatcombe was distinguished from the parent manor of Gatcombe on the Isle of Wight by the mid-fifteenth century, when Baldwin Bramshott first used the name "Little Gatcombe" as a distinct holding. The earliest recorded lords held the manor from the King in chief by grand serjeanty for the defence of Portchester Castle, the most complete Roman fort surviving in northern Europe.

Notable Lords

Edmund Dudley held the manor in the early sixteenth century. He served as Speaker of the House of Commons and became Henry VII's chief financial enforcer, collecting Crown debts, bonds and fines across England. He was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1510. His son became Duke of Northumberland, and his grandson married Lady Jane Grey.

Admiral Sir Roger Curtis, 1st Baronet, held Little Gatcombe in the late eighteenth century. Curtis was the hero of the Great Siege of Gibraltar and served as Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth from 1809 to 1812. His baronetcy was created specifically as "of Gatcombe in the parish of Wymering".

Primary source: Victoria County History of Hampshire, Vol. 3, pp. 165-170.