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Like the other hundreds in the county, Cleley is first mentioned in the Northamptonshire geld roll of c. 1075. (fn. 9) In 1086 three Northamptonshire hundreds (apartfrom the eight held by Peterborough Abbey) were in private hands and it is possiblethat Cleley was also, since it may already have been held with Potterspury by Henryde Ferrers. (fn. 10...

The major event in the history of the hundred in the early modern period was thecreation of the honor of Grafton, a large royal estate centred on the formerWoodville manors of Grafton and Hartwell, established by Act of Parliament in1542, which included land in several other parishes in Cleley as well as furtherafield. (fn. 28)Thereafter, until the...

As in the period before the Civil War, changes on the Crown estate dominate thehistory of the hundred in the late 17th and 18th centuries. (fn. 31)In 1665 the honor wasconveyed to the trustees of Catherine of Braganza's marriage settlement andremained in their hands throughout the queen's long widowhood. After herdeath at the end of 1705, instead o...

The spirit of improvement on the Wakefield Lodge estate continued under the 4thduke of Grafton, who in the early 1840s agreed to a large-scale programme ofrebuilding existing farms and establishing new ones on land inclosed over theprevious half-century. During the same period the last open-field parish in thehundred, Stoke Bruerne, where Grafton w...

The first signs that a traditional way of life was about to change came just beforethe First World War, in a small way in the south of the hundred, where theCountess of Warwick sold the Passenham Manor estate in 1911, and on a largerscale to the north, where the 7th duke of Grafton auctioned about 2,000 acres,some of it outside Cleley, but also inc...