The Olifards’ Manor, like that of the du Lays, derived from land held in 1086 by Roger (probably an ancestor of the Olifards) from Countess Judith, widow of Earl Waltheof. By the early 1100s a large portion of this land has held by the Olifard family, who also held a manor at Lilford in Northamptonshire. The last of the Olifards, David, was Lord between about 1244 and his death around 1250, although his widow Dervorguilla occupied the manor in Oakington until her death in the 1290s. The estate, along with that in Lilford, was inherited by Walter of Moray (son of David’s sister) and his son William, who by 1299 had conveyed it to Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham. The bishop held the Oakington and Lilford estates until just before his death in 1311, when he granted them his brother’s grandson Sir Robert Willoughby. Successive generations of Willoughbys then held both estates for much of the next two centuries. Lords included William Willoughby and his second wife Joan (nee Holland) who had previously been married to the Duke of York. Upon William’s death in 1409, Joan continued to possess the estate, along with her subsequent third and fourth husbands, until she died in 1434, after which the manor passed to William’s son Robert Willoughby and then his son-in-law Sir Richard Wells. Wells and his oldest son were executed for rebellion in 1470, leaving the manor to his daughter Joan and her husband Richard Hastings, who sold both the Oakington and Lilford estates to William Brown of Stamford in 1472. Both estates then passed to Brown’s son-in-law John Elmes, and the Elmes family subsequently held Oakington until 1663 when it was sold to Samuel Reche. At that time it was one of the largest estates in the parish.
What happened after that is unclear, but the estate may have passed at some stage to Elizabeth March of Fulbourn, who held a large estate in Oakington in the 1720s. When she died in 1722, Elizabeth left her Oakington estate as an endowment to found five schools in the parishes of Fulbourn, Brinkley, Fen Ditton, Haddenham and Histon. The resulting ‘Free School estate’ covered 200 acres in Oakington, making it the third largest in the parish. The estate, which was reduced to about 140 acres at Enclosure in 1834, remained with the trustees of Elizabeth’s charity until around 1910, when about 130 acres of the land was acquired by the County Council. The remainder, including the farmhouse that stood east of High Street and south of the church, was also sold at this time.
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/
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