The Manor of Tempsford Mossbury alias Sarnes

Volume II of the Victoria County History of Bedfordshire was published in 1909 and gives the history of the manors in Tempsford. Much less is known about the Manor of Mossbury alias Sarnes than the Manor of Tempsford. At the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086 its extent was given as 1 hide and 1¾ virgates in the possession of the Bishop of Lincoln. The Bishop seems to have remained overlord until 1428 when the right lapsed.

William de Carun was undertenant to the Bishop of Lincoln at Domesday and the manor stayed with the Carun family until 1228 when it was alienated to John de Loring. It was eventually transferred to Nicholas de Sernes, from whom the manor gets its unusual name, and was then conveyed to the Abbot of Saint Mary’s, Stratford in 1297. In 1332 the Abbot obtained a license to transfer his property in Tempsford to John Morice and his wife Agnes. The manor later passed to Thomas Fulthorpe, then to Fulthorpe’s grandson John Dale and to Dale’s granddaughter Joan, wife of William Woolascote. Her son alienated it to Laurence Saunderson whose son John held it in 1669. His sister Anne, widow of Robert Hasleden, conveyed it to Johnn Wilshere in 1683. In 1737 it was owned by Barwell Colling and in 1803 it was transferred by William Colling Cumming to Godfrey Thornton. A succession of Law of Property Acts in the 1920s effectively abolished manors in all but name.