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Throckmortons or Boxes Manor Roxton

Volume III of The Victoria County History for Bedfordshire, published in 1912, gives the history of manors in Roxton as far as they were known at the time. The Manor of Throckmortons alias Boxes had its origin in land belonging to Sir George Throckmorton, Lord of the Manor of Roxton, which he granted to William Boxe, a citizen of London in 1546.

The Mordaunt family coat of arms
The Mordaunt family coat of arms

By 1554 the manor had come into the hands of John, Lord Mordaunt, who also had Roxton Manor and whose family held the manors until 1624 when it was transferred to French apothecary Gideon de Lanie, de Laune or Delawne. He was a surgeon to Anne of Denmark, queen of James I (1603-1624) and Master of the Apothecaries' Society in 1637. He also held Roxton Manor, Colesden Manor and Netherbury Manor in Great Barford and died in 1659 when he was succeeded by his son William. The last mention of the Delawne family as holding the manor is in 1715.

By 1737 Throckmortons alias Boxes Manor was in the hands of William Metcalfe and his family held the manor for over a hundred years. By 1854 Charles James Metcalfe had conveyed the manor to Rev. Robert Delap of Monellan [Ireland] whose son James Bogle Delap held it into the 20th century. A succession of Law of Property Acts in the 1920s abolished manorial fines and incidents as well as copyhold land tenure, thus abolishing manors in practically all but name.