OAKLEY PARK, AS HOXNE HALL WAS RENAMED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, BECAUSE ITS ESTATE LAY LARGELY IN THE PARISH OF OAKLEY, was a remodelling of an older house, and stood some three miles north-east of Eye near the Norfolk border. There was a monastery here before the Norman Conquest but in the early Middle Ages the property passed to the Bishops of Norwich whose palace it became. The palace was a large complex of buildings with a road running through them, and it has been suggested that this was the site of the Roman Villa Faustina, subsequently taken over by the Anglo-Saxons and adapted to other uses.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was leased to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk but in 1543 the manor was granted to Sir Robert Southwell, Master of the Rolls. From the Southwell family it passed in 1621 to the Prescotts, and is said to have been acquired in 1642 by the Maynard family of Great Easton in Essex. The lordship of the manor and the property appear to have been in separate hands at this stage in their history. It seems that the estate passed from the Prescotts to the Style family, a member of which had married a Prescott. Subsequently it was acquired, possibly through marriage, by the Maynard family whose ownership lasted until 1820, when the estate was sold to Matthias Kerrison, a niece of whom had married Henry Maynard. Kerrison was a wealthy grain merchant from Bungay, who also bought nearby Brome Hall from the Cornwallis family. It was during its tenure by Matthias Kerrison’s son, General Sir Edward Kerrison Bt, that the house became known as Oakley Park. The estate remained in the family until shortly before the house was demolished.

TOWHAT EXTENT the episcopal palace survived once it came into the hands of lay owners is not clear. A map of the Hoxne estate in 1619 shows a six-bay rectangular U-shaped house with the projecting full-height entrance porch placed in the second bay from the left of the recessed cross-wing. In front of the house was a gatehouse flanked by substantial service buildings. The gatehouse tower is depicted as a more ornate structure than the house itself, suggesting that it may have been a survival from episcopal times and that a new house was built in the late Tudor or early Stuart period.