Pitsea Hall belongs to a far older Pitsea than the twentieth-century shopping centre and housing estates. The manor developed within a rural parish of farms, marshland, creeks and scattered buildings close to the Thames-side marshes. Its history therefore provides an important link with Pitsea before Basildon New Town.
The history of the estate reaches back far beyond the surviving house. Accounts of Pitsea's manorial history record an estate here around the time of the Norman Conquest. Land associated with Pitsea later passed through a succession of religious and private owners, including connections with St John's Abbey at Colchester.
One of the most significant names associated with the manor is Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister of Henry VIII. In 1539 the manor of Pitsea Hall, together with the advowson of the church, was granted to Thomas, Lord Cromwell. This historic ownership is the source of the modern name Cromwell Manor.
The age of Cromwell Manor is sometimes described differently by local and commercial sources. Some describe it as fifteenth-century. Historic England's statutory listing, however, identifies the surviving building as a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century timber-framed and plastered house, subsequently altered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is therefore useful to distinguish the much older history of the manor and estate from the date assigned to the fabric of the house that survives today.
The hall stood near Pitsea Creek at the bottom of the higher ground around old Pitsea. For centuries this was a predominantly agricultural landscape. The proximity of the creek, marshes and farmland explains why the setting would once have looked dramatically different from modern Pitsea Hall Lane.