The Duncombe and Pauncefort-Duncombe Family
4a — Great Brickhill Heritage | People & Families
For several centuries the Duncombe and later Pauncefort-Duncombe family were closely bound up with Great Brickhill. Their story is not simply that of a manor house or a wealthy family: it runs through landownership, farming, housing, the church, village government, education and employment.
A long Great Brickhill association
The Duncombe name appears deep in Great Brickhill’s manorial history. Later marriages and inheritances brought the Pauncefort name into the family, producing the form Pauncefort-Duncombe that became especially familiar in the nineteenth century. The surviving title history is complicated, and different local accounts describe parts of the succession in different ways, but the central fact is clear: by the nineteenth century the family had become the dominant landed family in the parish.
Sir Philip Duncombe Pauncefort Duncombe
Philip Duncombe Pauncefort Duncombe was born in 1818 and succeeded to the Great Brickhill estate on his father’s death in 1849. He became High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1855, was a Deputy Lieutenant, and was created a baronet in 1859. From Great Brickhill Manor he occupied the position traditionally associated with the village squire: principal landowner, landlord, employer and a figure with responsibilities extending far beyond his own household.
Michael Warth’s study of Great Brickhill in the mid nineteenth century describes Sir Philip as owning nearly seventy per cent of the parish. The estate included Home Farm and a number of the major farms let to tenants, together with cottages, woodland and other property. Estate ownership therefore affected where people lived, who farmed particular holdings and how buildings and land were maintained.
Landlord, employer and village responsibility
The relationship between the estate and the village was practical as well as social. The landlord was responsible for major repairs and improvements to estate farms and cottages and had a direct interest in roads, drainage and the condition of agricultural buildings. The estate supported a considerable workforce, from farm tenants and labourers to domestic and estate staff.
This did not mean that Great Brickhill was simply a private estate village. The Rector owned important land of his own, independent farmers and smaller owners remained, and village charities and parish institutions had their own responsibilities. What the Duncombe estate provided was a dominant framework within which much of nineteenth-century village life operated.
Church and community
The family’s role continued into church and community life. Contemporary Great Brickhill parish-magazine reports from the 1890s record Sir Philip and Lady Duncombe supporting church restoration and heating, the organ, school activities and local charitable and educational work. Sir Philip served as the Rector’s churchwarden. Lady Pauncefort Duncombe was involved in the Mothers’ Union and technical education and distributed prizes at the village school.
The same reports show the grounds and facilities associated with the family being used for village and district gatherings. In 1895 a fête for Great Brickhill and Stoke Hammond was held in the playing field by Sir Philip’s permission, while a Mothers’ Union gathering brought women from six parishes to the Manor grounds. Such events illustrate how a landed family could shape the social life of the village as well as its landscape.
The estate and farming families
The Duncombe story is inseparable from the farming families who worked the land. Westfield, Galley Lane, Ivy Lane, Park and Eaton Leys were among the important estate farms in the nineteenth century. Families such as the Clements, Hammonds and Franklins could remain associated with holdings for long periods, creating continuity between the estate and the wider village community.
For the wider farming pattern, see Farming and the Great Brickhill Estates, and for Michael Warth’s detailed original nineteenth-century account see Sir Philip Duncombe Pauncefort Duncombe and The Tenant Farmers.
A changing relationship
By the end of the nineteenth century the old pattern was beginning to change. Agricultural depression, changing local government, the sale and reorganisation of estates and the gradual shift from landlord-and-tenant farming altered the balance of village life. The family’s role therefore belongs to a particular historical system rather than to a timeless picture of Great Brickhill.
Even so, the physical and documentary traces remain strong. Farm boundaries, property names, church records, estate documents and the surviving histories of village families all carry evidence of the period when the Duncombe and Pauncefort-Duncombe family stood at the centre of Great Brickhill’s landed estate.
Explore further: Michael Warth’s original Great Brickhill in the Mid 1800s material
Further material is available within the membership (restricted) pages.