LOCAL GOVERNMENT
The Parish Council consists of nine Members,
one of whom is the Chairman and another the Vice-Chairman. Regular Council
Meetings take place in the Village Hall on the second Thursday of each
month. There is a paid part-time Clerk to the Council and Council Offices
at 'Palafox', The Hyde. The Council also owns and manages a Cemetery in
Crack Lane. where it employs a part-time
Caretaker. It also appoints a Public Rights-of-Way
Officer, a Tree Officer, a Youth Liaison Officer, and an Emergency Liaison
Officer. It appoints representatives on the management Committee of the Timson Trust (two Almshouses
within the village), the Village Hall Committee and the Purbeck Association
of Parish and Town Councils. In conjunction with the Parish Council of
Worth Matravers it appoints a Governor of St. George's First School.
The Parishes of Langton Matravers and Worth Matravers
elect a District Councillor for the Langton Ward of Purbeck District Council,
which sits in Wareham. The County Council sits in Dorchester, the
County Town of Dorset.
MANORS
Five of the old Saxon hidage boundaries can still
be traced, running in straight lines from the village street southwards
to the cliffs. By the Thirteenth Century these strips of land, each of
which had originally been allocated to a family, had developed into three
manors, remains of which still exist. In the east the Manor of Langton
Mautravers (or Maltravers) stretched westwards as far as the Church. In
the west, stretching far beyond the parish boundary, lay the huge Manor
of Langton Wallis. Between these lay the tiny Manor of Durnford. The Manor
of Langton Mautravers was named after its mediaeval lords who had come
from Normandy in 1066, and who also owned Worth Matravers for a short time.
They lived first at Woolcombe Matravers and later at Lytchett Matravers.
The remains of this manor now belongs to the Encombe Estate which purchased it in 1875. The larger western manor was also
named after its mediaeval lords, the Le Walleys family, who came from Brittany
in 1066. From the early Seventeenth Century this was owned by the Bankes
family of Kingston Lacy, until in 1982 it was bequeathed to the National
Trust. Together with Corfe Castle, it now forms part of the Trust's Purbeck
Estate. The lords of the two larger manors were always absentees, so there
were no manor houses within the parish. However, the lords of the tiny
Manor of Durnford were called De Derneford and resided in Langton.