The village name is
Anglo Saxon in origin and means 'woodland clearing'. In the
Domesday Book of 1086 it was recorded as
Lee and was, following the
Norman Conquest, granted by
William I to
Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. Its early history is closely tied up with that of
Weston Turville and a
chapel-of-ease was established in this connection. It and also had associations with the
Earl of Leicester who, in the early part of the 12th century, charged Ralph de Halton to oversee the lands. At the end of that century the Turville family took over this role. Soon after this
Robert, Earl of Leicester granted the land to
Missenden Abbey. After the dissolution of the abbey The Lee stayed in the possession of the Crown until 1547 when
Edward VI granted a lease on the estate to
John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford. The events that led to
Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford initially leasing the lands at The Lee to William Plaistowe in 1635 and later selling the land to the Plaistowe family are obscure; either they were mortgaged to pay off debts or were sequestrated as a consequence of the Russells' involvement on the "wrong" side of the
English Civil War. Thomas Plaistowe, who died in 1715, was the first of the family to be the outright owner of The Lee and his namesake in 1785 passed ownership to his daughter Elizabeth, who married Irishman Henry Deering. Deering bequeathed the estate in 1827 to his friend
John Peter Gandy, the architect, who
changed his name to that of his benefactor. The Plaistowes owned the village for another 50 years. ==Twentieth century==