disappeared, which is much to be regretted in this utilitarian and unimaginative age.
THE D'ARCY FAMILY Domesday Book tells us that Nocton was divided in unequal shares between two landlords, Ulf and Osulf; on the land of the former there was already a church with a priest in 1086. These owners had given place to one Norman de Ardreci, written later de Aresci, and finally D'Arcy, a companion of the Conqueror. Norman D'Arcy's son granted the churches of Nocton and Dunston to the Benedictines of St. Mary's Abbey, York, also some land to the Carthusians of Kirkstead Abbey, and himself founded a priory at Nocton for canons of the Orders of St. Augustine, who first settled in England in 1108. The buildings are quite gone, but the site is still called the Abbey Field, and the vicarage is called the Priory; the Priory well, whose water was said to be "remarkably good," in 1727, was only filled up about fifty years ago. Why couldn't they have let it alone, one wonders. To follow up the history of Nocton: in 1541 Henry VIII. and Katharine Howard slept there.
The D'Arcy family and their descendants in the female line, whose married names were Lymbury, Pedwardine, Wymbishe and Towneley, held the property for three and twenty generations till the middle of the seventeenth century—a good innings of 600 years. But the losses which the Civil War brought about made it necessary for Robert Towneley, at the Restoration in 1660, to sell the estate to Lord Stanhope, from whom it soon passed by sale to Sir William Ellys, about 1676, and in 1726—by the marriage of Sir Richard Ellys' widow—to Sir Francis Dashwood; after whom, in 1767, it descended to a cousin, George Hobart, eventually third Earl of Buckinghamshire. He altered Nocton considerably, pulled down the church, which was too near the house, and set up a poor structure further off, where the present church stands. He also spent much in draining Nocton fen, and erected a windmill pump which raised the water and sent it into the Witham, and worked well for forty years till it was superseded in Frederick Robinson's time (1834) by a forty-horse-power steam engine which was found to pump the water faster than the fens could supply it. The earl died in 1804; ten years later his daughter, Lady Sarah Albinia, carried the estate to Frederick John Robinson, second son of Lord Grantham, who became Prime Minister and was created Viscount Goodrich in 1827, and Earl of Ripon in 1833; and,
