BARKING HALL, SITUATED ONE AND HALF MILES SOUTH-WEST OF NEEDHAM MARKET, became one of the seats of the Earls of Ashburnham in the eighteenth century. Standing next to the parish church, it was the ‘big house’ of a small village but of a substantial estate.

In the early medieval period the manor of Barking (otherwise Barking cum Needham) was apparently a possession of the monastery of Ely. Before the end of the Middle Ages, however, it had passed to the Bishop of Ely from whom it was taken in 1562/3 by the Crown, the bishop being compensated by payment of a pension of £135 a year. Half a century later it was sold to Sir Francis Needham and John Yeomans. On Sir Francis's death in 1637 his son Thomas inherited the property, but it was then sold to Sir Francis Theobald whose son Robert left it to his sister Anne, the wife of Reverend Joseph Gascoyne, vicar of Enfield. It then passed to the Gascoyne's daughter Theodosia, who married John Crowley of Greenwich, a merchant and alderman of London with substantial interests in shipping, iron trades and property in the London area, the Midlands and the North-East of England. Crowley's sons died without male heirs and the estate passed to his four daughters, the youngest of whom, Elizabeth, married the second Earl of Ashburnham in 1756. Barking then passed into the Ashburnham family. It was to remain in their ownership until the end of the Great War.

BARKING HALL dated from the early years of the eighteenth century but replaced an earlier house lived in by the Theobald family in the late seventeenth century. Parts of this building, which, having twenty-two hearths in 1674, must have been of significant size, appear to have survived as ‘the old wing’, which was used as service quarters. The centre block of the plain sash-windowed house was of nine bays and three storeys, the two outer bays at each end projecting forward and having pediments. Two-storey wings each of two bays were added later in the eighteenth century. Both the central block and the wings had hipped roofs and plain brick balustrades. The windows were set in the brickwork without any ornamentation except in the case of the windows in the central bay where, on the upper floors, they had stone surrounds, with the first floor window also having a shallow segmental pediment.