Needless to say, the place had a long history before the present Hall was built. Already at the time of the Domesday Survey it had its church and priest, and its manor had been given by Ailric, its owner in Edward the Confessor’s reign, as an endowment to the newly built Abbey of Westminster. Mention is especially made of the woodland, which still is such a feature of the place, and which then formed an unbroken tract, a mile and a half in length, and half a mile in breadth. No other property was held by the Abbey in Lincolnshire, and doubtless the distance made its personal management by the Abbot and convent difficult and inconvenient. At all events, from very early times the manor was held under them, for a fee-farm rent of £12 per annum, by the knightly family of Pigot, whose long tenure, lasting for some ten generations, attached their name to that of the place, to distinguish it from the several other parishes so-called. Even so, difficulties at times arose; and in 1303 the Abbot had to make complaint in the King’s courts that Sir Baldwin Pigot had failed to render the customary rents and services, and that when he caused his beasts at Doddington to be seized, the knight and his men had rescued them and assaulted the Abbot’s servants. As a rule, however, this fixed rent of £12 continued to be paid by successive tenants to the monastery until the Dissolution. It then passed into possession of the Crown; in 1661 it was sold with other Crown rents by Charles II. to Sir Edmund Turnor, and from his direct descendant it was redeemed by the late owner of Doddington in 1860, after a continuous payment of some 700 years. It is not our purpose here, however, to trace the early history of the place. It will be sufficient to say that as early as 1194 John Pigot asserted against the Abbot his right to hold not only the manor, but the advowson of the rectory, the patronage of which has remained to his successors down to the present day. Another Sir John Pigot in 1275 claimed to have not only right of free chase and warren in his woods at Doddington, but also his own gallows there—a right which he pleaded that his ancestors had exercised for a hundred years past. The last of the family, yet another Sir John Pigot, was High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1433, and died without surviving issue in 1450. His widow not only retained possession of the estate, in spite of two remarriages, but contrived to sell the reversion of it after her death to her neighbour, Sir Thomas Burgh, Knt.