The Dissolution
For two hundred and fifty years, the manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey were the business of Westminster Abbey. Not the dramatic business of kings and queens, but the quieter kind: rents collected, tenants managed, fields leased to local farmers, the right to appoint Knowle’s parish priest and with it, responsibility for the spiritual care of its people, held by the Abbot in London. The monks of Westminster administered these Warwickshire lands through stewards and proctors, at a distance, as income - the earthly foundation of a perpetual prayer for a queen who had been dead for two centuries.
The chantry endowment had turned three working estates into instruments of remembrance, and the practical consequence was absentee administration of a kind that left tenants and parish alike answerable to an institution two days’ ride away. When the Abbey’s own accounts were audited around 1300, its estates across the West Midlands and Home Counties ran to some 38,000 acres. Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey were three small entries in a very large account.
On Knowle’s eastern boundary, the same institutional distance shaped a different story. Balsall (another of Roger de Mowbray’s grants, given to the Knights Templar in the reign of King Stephen) had passed through the suppression of the Templars in 1308, through the Knights Hospitaller, and arrived at the Dissolution in much the same condition as its neighbours: a working estate administered by an order, leased to tenant farmers, its church appropriated and its advowson held by men who lived elsewhere. The Hospitallers had rented out much of the estate as a farm. Temple Balsall, as it came to be known, had the same Mowbray origins as Knowle and the same institutional fate - a place governed by tenure rather than lordship.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541 ended this arrangement, though not cleanly. Westminster Abbey was dissolved on 16 January 1540 and its estates passed to the Crown. The same year, Henry erected it as a cathedral church under a Bishop of Westminster. Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey, released from their chantry purpose, were granted to the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, a man already practised in the enforcement of religious conformity, who had tried heretics under Henry’s Act of the Six Articles. Balsall was granted to Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife.
What followed was a decade of theological turbulence that moved the manors around like pieces on a board. Bonner was deprived of his office in 1549 under the Protestant settlement of Edward VI and replaced by Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London and Westminster, who had signed the letters patent giving the throne to Lady Jane Grey. When Mary came to the throne in 1553 the board was reset: Ridley was deprived, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake in Oxford in October 1555. Bonner was restored. The tenants of Knowle and Diddington, their fields and their rents, had passed between two bishops of opposed convictions, the theological argument conducted far above the heads of the tenants who worked the land. When Elizabeth came to the throne and deprived Bonner in 1559 - he would die in the Marshalsea prison a decade later, unreformed and unrepentant - the grant was revoked and the manors returned to the Crown.
They remained there, as part of the Royal Demesne, until 1573, when Elizabeth granted Knowle and Diddington to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532-1588). The grant was a mark of exceptional favour. Dudley was the son of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and Lord Protector during the minority of Edward VI, and brother of Lord Guildford Dudley, who was executed in 1554 along with his wife, Lady Jane Grey, the ‘nine days queen’. Robert himself was imprisoned in the Tower at the same time and narrowly escaped his brother’s fate; Elizabeth’s accession five years later restored him to favour entirely. He was her closest companion from the first days of her reign, ennobled, enriched, and the subject of persistent speculation about the nature of their relationship. His Warwickshire estate, centred on Kenilworth Castle, was one of the great private accumulations of Elizabethan England. Knowle and Diddington slotted into the estate naturally. His crest, the bear and ragged staff, the ancient device of the Earls of Warwick, recorded in William Bowers’ Heroica Eulogia of 1567, had been granted to his father in a new creation of the Earldom - his brother Ambrose held the title, but Robert held the land.
Balsall, which had passed through various hands after the Dissolution, would eventually reach Lady Katherine Leveson, granddaughter of Sir Robert Dudley. She bequeathed the whole lordship for the founding of a hospital for the reception and maintenance of indigent women of fair character, with a minister appointed to instruct the pensioners and to teach the poorest boys of the parish until fit to be put to apprentice.
Around 1580, Diddington Hall and Diddington Farm were built on the estate. A hall implies a presence, a household, an intention to use the land rather than merely hold it. The route from Kenilworth to Diddington runs north through what had been the Forest of Arden, good hunting country, close enough for a day’s ride. Whether Dudley used Diddington for the hunt, for accommodation, or as a residence for his household, the building of a hall was the first time in nearly three centuries that someone had invested in these lands as a place rather than a line in an account book.
It did not last. Dudley’s secret marriage to Lettice Knollys in 1578 enraged Elizabeth, who never forgave Lettice and banished her from court permanently. The reconciliation between Elizabeth and Dudley was partial and painful. In 1588, when the Spanish Armada threatened England, Dudley stood beside the Queen as she delivered her speech to the troops at Tilbury - his last significant public act. He died in September of that year, and with him the personal connection to the Warwickshire lands he had built and hunted across. The manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey reverted once more to the possession of the Crown, their position unchanged from where it had been before the grant - administered at a distance, waiting for a new lordship to be granted.
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