The Abbot’s Manor House is marked on the early OS maps and lies some 100 metres north of the church in Gedney. Some yards north of the church was a covered way from the house to the chancel, where broken projecting arches are still visible on the north side. {1}{2} There are slight amorphous earthworks now under crop, in the arable field to the immediate north of the churchyard. They are possibly associated with the manor house but no surface building remains were noted and the 'projecting arches' of the chancel are not evident. {3}{4} A manor house on this site was owned by Crowland Abbey probably from the 1260s when Walter of Thirkleby sold a capital messuage to the monks of Crowland. The Abbey then held the manor until the Dissolution, hence the name of Abbot’s Manor that it acquired. Crowland certainly had property interests in Gedney by the mid 12th century. This manor was part of Walter of Thirkleby’s land in Gedney that had descended to him through Alice the grand-daughter of Fulk III D’Oyry. The site was probably the early home of the D’Oyry family (important tenants of the Earls of Aumale) and there is a 12th century charter of Crowland Abbey that suggests their house was to the north of the church. Crowland Abbey had been granted the church of Gedney probably in the 1150s by Emecina the wife of Geoffrey D’Oyry. It is this Emecina, a wealthy heiress from south Lincolnshire who married into the D’Oyry family and provided the family’s first estate centred on Gedney. {11} The manor house was occupied in 1706 by Sir John Buckworth. {12} The manor house is noted by William Marratt in 1814, and he describes the building as ‘anciently a noble building but at the time it was taken down it was nothing but a large heap of stones’ which suggests that the building had gone by 1814. Marratt published two views of the Manor House. The building appears to be a 16th or 17th century house probably of brick and with a thatched roof. {3} In 1951, the churchyard was extended northwards to include the site of the manor house and it seems that the surviving earthworks were bulldozed to prepare it for the churchyard. {8}