At the time of the Domesday Book of 1086, 1.5 ploughlands (perhaps around 180 acres of land) was held by Countess Judith, widow of Earl Waltheof. However, this estate was subsequently divided. One portion had passed to the Burdesley family by around 1200, and then by marriage to John du Lay of Great Paxton (Huntingdonshire). John du Lay is recorded as holding 80 acres in demesne in Oakington in 1279. He also had a manor house here, located east of the church, which was later recorded as having 15 hearths in 1662 and which was demolished in 1970 to make space for bungalows. In the 1330s the Lay’s manor passed to William Lengleys (a royal officer) and, by marriage of his daughter Gillian, to the Restwold family, who lived in Berkshire. Several generations later, the Restwolds sold the estate in 1501, and by about 1524 it appears have come to Christopher Burgoyne of Longstanton, who had a manor here in the 1560s. Burgoyne’s daughter Thomasine married Robert Shute, who subsequently owned the estate.
Robert Shute was the son of Oakington man Christopher Shute, and attended Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the 1540s. He later became a lawyer and a politician, serving as M.P. for Cambridge from 1571 to 1581, as Baron of the Exchequer (a judge in the English court of the Exchequer of Pleas) from 1579 to 1586, and as a Justice of the Queen’s Bench from 1586 to his death in 1590. His Oakington estate passed to his daughter Joan, who married John Hatton of Longstanton. Their son, Sir Robert Hatton, inherited the estate and probably lived there from about 1610 to the 1640s. The Hattons were major landowners in Longstanton at this time (and afterwards), and Sir Robert held land there as well as in Oakington. He became an M.P. in 1641, and supported the king during the first Civil War (1642–1646), after which he fled overseas to escape from his unpaid debts. His Oakington estate was seized and subsequently sold to Major General Lewis Audley in 1652, but was subsequently recovered by Sir Anthony Aucher, another Royalist M.P. and widower of Hatton’s daughter Elizabeth. The subsequent descent of the estate, later known as “Hatton’s great farm” is unclear, but by the 1820s it was owned by Henry John Adeane of Babraham Hall and by the time of Enclosure in 1834 covered 570 acres. Adeane emerged from Enclosure with 301 acres, which was later divided into Meadow Farm (153 acres) and Poplar Farm (143 acres). Henry Adeane’s grandson, C. R. W. Adeane, sold both farms to S. A. Taylor, who in 1920 sold Meadow Farm to the County Council.
Sources include:
- ‘Oakington: Introduction’, in A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 9, Chesterton, Northstowe, and Papworth Hundreds, ed. A P M Wright, C P Lewis( London, 1989), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol9/pp192-195 [accessed 17 September 2024].
- https://opendomesday.org/place/TL4164/oakington/
If you have any information or photos of Lay’s Manor / Hatton’s Great Farm, please leave a comment below.
See also: Meadow Farm
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