This collection comprises mainly title deeds covering the period 1653 to 1920, but also includes wills and other probate records, certified copies of parish register entries, an estate map, valuations and a few letters. Much of the material concerns land transactions involving the Neate family, who held property in parts of Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Middlesex and Kent (relevant title deeds can be found among the documents listed below). In 1810 the advowson of Alvescot Rectory was conveyed to Thomas Neate of Binfield, then in the 1850s the estate of Alvescot Manor came into the
possession of Arthur Neate (Thomas's son), who was then living at Alvescot. In fact, three members of the Neate family were Rectors of Alvescot in the nineteenth century: Thomas, 1808-29, Arthur, 1829-70, and Walter, son of Arthur, from 1878.
There is a fair amount of documentation relating to the settlement of the properties of Thomas and Arthur Neate. The archive also contains series of earlier deeds when parts of the Alvescot Estate were owned by other families, notably the Kirbys and Godwins.
When this office received the collection on deposit in June 1971, via Kent Record Office (accession number 955), it had already been divided into bundles. In the course of cataloguing the structure of these bundles has been maintained on the whole. However, on occasions it seemed appropriate to reorganise the existing arrangement, to try to reflect the original order of the deeds. This was complicated by the fact that some of the deeds could as easily fit in one sequence as another.
The new reference codes relate to the bundle numbers/letters as follows:
E8/1 = Bundle 1
E8/2 = Bundle 2
E8/3 = Bundle 3
E8/4 = Bundles 4 and 11
E8/5 = Bundle 5 (A)
E8/6 = Bundles 6 (B), 12 and 13
E8/7 = Bundle 7 (C)
E8/8 = Bundles 8 (D), 9 (E) and 10 (F)
E8/9 = Bundle 14
Catalogued by Mark Priddey, April 1994.