Catalogue description Bass Family Estate Papers

The collection consists entirely of documents relating to title to property. The properties are those acquired by the Bass family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Needwood, mainly around Anslow Gate, Hanbury Woodend and Rangemore. Except for one farm (Hanbury Woodend Farm) the deeds date from the disafforestation and enclosure of Needwood and illustrate the building up of blocs of property in the period following enclosure.

Bass family of Needwood

Deposited by Bircham and Co., Westminster, per British Records Association

• Needwood, Staffordshire

The main estates were those purchased from C.R. Tennant in 1878. Of these, Needwood House Estate was built up by John Spencer in the post-enclosure period; Hanbury Park estate was leased by the Crown to Robert Stone in 1825; and Hanbury Woodend was acquired piecemeal by the Manleys in the seventeenth century. All these passed from John Spence Stone to Arthur Hinckley in 1838, and Tennant in 1849. A small copyhold estate near Rolleston was acquired piecemeal by the Tennants in the early nineteenth century. The other major acquisition was the Byrckley Lodge estate, acquired for the most part by Sneyd on the enclosure of Needwood, and acquired by Bass from Newdigate in 1886. Finally, in 1903, various properties in the Hanbury Woodend area were acquired, the main one being from Mosley and representing the gradual accumulation of a bloc of land, some of which had comprised an outlier of Spencer's Needwood House estate.

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