The Baldon estate descended in the male line of the de la Mare family for ten generations, from Geoffrey who held the land in Norman times, and his sons Henry and Robert (I). Thereafter the sequence of names was Peter (I), Robert (II), Peter (II), Robert (III), Peter (III), Robert IV), Peter (IV) and Robert (V). Some of these men featured in history at a national level.
Peter (II) was one of the rebels who sided with the French against King John in 1216, but he was pardoned in 1217 and given back ownership of Baldon and his Wiltshire manor. Peter (III) was the holder of Baldon in 1279 and a royal officer until his death in 1291. Robert (IV) inherited the property as a minor, coming of age in 1296. In 1306 he was in King Edward I’s retinue on his Scottish expedition.
Peter (IV) succeeded before 1318 to the Baldon property, as well as to lands in four other counties. Soon after, he forfeited his lands for his opposition to Edward II; they were restored in 1322, only to be again forfeited as a result of his joining a raid on the lands of John de Hadlow, a protegé of the king’s favourite, Hugh Despenser. Peter obtained a final pardon in 1324 and worked in royal service until his death in 1349.
Robert (V) followed his father as a royal official, being knighted in 1358. He died in 1382, and finally the male succession line was broken, when his daughter Willelma inherited, and on her death in 1410 the manor passed to her four-year-old grandson John Baynton.
In 1471 Sir Robert Baynton, probably John’s son, forfeited his estates, including Baldon, being charged with high treason after the Lancastrian defeat by King Edward IV at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Although the estate was granted successively by Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII, to their own loyalists, by 1503 John Baynton, son of Sir Robert, seems to have regained the property, as he sold it to Andrew Windsor. Windsor was one of the commanders of a successful expedition to France in 1523, and later became a counsellor to Cardinal Wolsey.
In 1558 Windsor’s son William granted the manor to Sir Thomas Pope and his wife Elizabeth, to pay off a debt incurred by his son.
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Danvers’s son and heir John died in 1616, aged only 30, but his widow Ann lived on at Baldon and took a second husband, Richard Goddard who was related to the Pollards, an old Devon family who held land in Little Baldon and Nuneham Courtenay. In 1635 Goddard’s stepdaughter Susan married John Pollard, and the Goddards transferred the manor to the newly-weds.
John died in 1670, and his son John, with his wife Elizabeth, succeeded to the property. In 1713 they sold the manor to their son-in-law Dr John Lane, a Bristol dealer in copper and lead, who had married their daughter Elizabeth.
Dr. Lane's bankruptcy in 1726 led to the conveyance of the manor to William Jennens of Long Wittenham, to be held in trust for Mrs. Elizabeth Lane (née Pollard). For 60 years she was lady of the manor. Her husband died in 1740, but she lived on until 1771. Her friendship with Sir Christopher Willoughby is recorded on a memorial tablet in the church, and her work for the parish is commemorated by the school house and its endowment.