after destroying Bardney Abbey, crossing the River Witham from Lindsey into Kesteven before travelling south towards Peterborough. By the late tenth century Nocton fell within the Langoe Wapentake within the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. By the eleventh century at the time of the coming of the Normans the settlement comprised 39 families and a church. All but one of 24 carucates of taxable land was owned by Ulf of Nocton who also owned 12 carucates in Dunston that was a jurisdiction of Nocton. Oswulf of Faldingworth owned the remaining carucate Remains of the medieval settlement were found along Main Street and the church and churchyard were traced to the south-west of the current Nocton Hall. Norman In the Domesday Survey of 1086 Nochetune (Nocton) was held in its entirety by Norman de Arci (later written d’Arcy), Lord of Nocton. Nocton’s entry in the Domesday Book put it in the largest 20% of settlements recorded in England. D'Arcy was allotted 33 parishes, also holding land in Dunston, Timberland, Kirkby Green and Scopwick. The previous Anglo-Saxon landlords had given place to Norman at some time between 1066 and 1086 and d’Arcy’s descendants held the property for 23 generations until the 1600s. The d'Arcy family had established a deer park at some time between 1086 and the early twelfth century and it became known as Nocton Park. Norman lords imported a craze for deer parks after 1066, their number growing from 37 to as many as 3000 by the fourteenth century. Deer parks were created in an area of the manor not under cultivation, hayfields or coppiced woods. In the early twelfth century, around 1140, Norman d’Arcy’s son Robert granted the church at Nocton to the Benedictines of St Mary's Abbey, York and some land to the Carthusians of Kirkstead Abbey. He also founded Nocton Park Priory, which stood about a mile east of the village on a hill overlooking Car Dyke, in or near the existing deer park, for the canons of the Augustinian Order who arrived in England from 1108. Its location on Abbey Hill remains evident in the shape of the ground. The grant was reconfirmed by Robert’s grandson, also called Norman, in a charter dated 17 Jun 1218. Nocton Park Priory was smaller and poorer than the other houses of the Witham Valley and never numbered more than nine canons. The long, parallel fields of Nocton Fen between