Lillingstone Dayrell is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Lillingstone Dayrell with Luffield Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, England. It is about three and a half miles north of Buckingham, eight miles west of Milton Keynes and five miles south of Towcester.
The village name 'Lillingstone' is Anglo Saxon in origin, and means 'Lytel's boundary stone', referring to the proximity of both places to the border with Northamptonshire. In the Domesday Book of 1086, both settlements were recorded jointly as Lillingestan though already at that time there were two manors owned respectively by the Dayrell and Lovell families. The suffix 'Dayrell' (as 'Dayerell') was first recorded in the fourteenth century. The Dayrell family were Lords of the Manor from the fourteenth century until the 1880s.[2]
Lillingstone House is the ancient seat of the Dayrell family.
In 1882, the banker Abraham John Robarts, of Robarts, Lubbock & Co., then the tenant of Lillingstone House, built Tile House in the village for himself, designed by Ewan Christian. This is described by Nikolaus Pevsner as “Neo-Elizabethan, big and forbidding with groups of huge chimneys.”[3]
Notable people
Gerald Robarts (1878–1961), banker, soldier, and notable squash player, lived at Lillingstone Dayrell House.[4]
Civil parish
In 1961 the parish had a population of 121.[5] On 1 April 2001 the parish was abolished and merged with Luffield Abbey to form "Lillingstone Dayrell with Luffield Abbey".[6]