Vision

There is no single place where the manorial history of the south coast of England has been brought together. The Victoria County History covers it parish by parish, volume by volume, published over the course of a century. The Manorial Documents Register records what survives and where it is held. County record offices hold the primary documents. But nobody has assembled the full picture for a defined geographic area and made it freely available.

That is what Sheldon Manors exists to do.

The Objective

To become the definitive digital resource for manorial descents along the south Hampshire coast, the Solent, and Chichester Harbour. Every manor documented. Every source cross-referenced. Every connection mapped. Freely accessible to researchers, solicitors, historians, and anyone with an interest in the medieval landscape of this part of England.

Built for the Long Term

This site is built on standard, well-understood technology. The database uses PostgreSQL. The front end uses clean, semantic HTML. There are no proprietary dependencies, no frameworks that will be abandoned in two years, nothing that requires specialist knowledge to maintain. The data is portable and the code is straightforward.

The intention is that this resource should still be useful and credible in fifty years. The manors documented here have histories stretching back a thousand years. The platform that records them should be built to last.

Phased Growth

The database will grow steadily. The initial focus is on manors with documented connections to Portchester Castle and Southwick Priory, the two institutions that bind the western and eastern ends of the coverage area together. From there, coverage will extend to every documented manor in the Portsdown hundred, the Bosham hundred, and the parishes around Chichester Harbour.

Future phases will add tithe map overlays, historic Ordnance Survey mapping, timeline visualisations, and integration with the Open Domesday project. The aim is depth within a defined area, not breadth across all of England.