Barkway Manors
The Domesday Book of 1086 mentions Barkway, Newsells, and Cokenach. Later on, 8 separate administrative manors were defined for Barkway. Probably the most important of these were Newsells, Cokenach, Rokey, and the Rectory Manor.
A manor formed part of an area within a parish or an administrative unit of a landed estate. The important aspect was the administration. Tenants paid rent and service to the lord of the manor and had to abide by the customs of the manor.
The rectory manor was granted to the church in Colchester in the 1100s, as also, interestingly, was the Abbotsbury manor in Barley. It came back to Barkway following the Reformation in 1536 under various ownerships until the Saltonstalls later on in the 1500s.
The rectory manor existed in its own right as a separate manor within the village, having, besides Manor Farm, the church, vicarage, tenants; it would have had a substantial land holding. This was a fairly unusual arrangement and only happened where the church, having sufficient endowments, was rich enough therefore to be part of its own manor. This setup was earlier covered in an article on the Saltonstall family, lords of the manor in the 1600s.
The classic grouping of church, manor house, and vicarage in Church Lane are therefore an ancient site and sit on an important westerly track, departing from the otherwise linear nature of the High Street.
Rokey manor extended from the Royston Road to the Reed parish boundary, so including, of course, the ancient woodland of Rokey. That parish boundary is also the boundary between the two Saxon hundreds of Edwinstree and Odsey. The probably last Rokey manor house was on the site of the moated house platform in Bush Wood. This would have become redundant when the Rokey manor was sold for £280 in 1546 to the Newsells estate. Whatever buildings existed within Rokey manor have long since disappeared; the windmill on the Millcroft site went around 1900, being one of the last.
Other manors came to be held by Newsells over time. The rectory manor came into Cokenach ownership from the Saltonstall family in 1659 and was then sold on to Newsells in the 1750s. Following the ending of the manorial system, Newsells remained a power locally, and her influence in the improvement of Barkway life, particularly in the 1800s, has already been covered elsewhere.