The origins of Bletchingley stretch back to prehistoric times and there are signs of Iron-Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon occupation over a long period. It has a compelling history that includes a period of ownership by one of Henry VIII’s wives and the dubious distinction of being a rotten borough.
There is no surviving written record of Bletchingley before the Domesday Book in 1086 but its Anglo-Saxon roots are firmly established by linguistic and administrative evidence.
Its name comes from Old English Blecchingeleah, and combines three Saxon words: Blecca (a local Anglo-Saxon leader's name), ing (the people of), and lēah (a woodland clearing). Put together, the name means ‘the woodland clearing of Blecca’s people.’ Place-names ending in -ingeleah date back to the early waves of Saxon settlement (around the 5th to 7th centuries) when clearings were named after the tribal leaders who claimed them.
Bletchingley lay within the Tandridge hundred, which was a traditional Anglo-Saxon judicial and military division of land established during the mid tenth century. In 1066 the manor was held from Edward the Confessor by Alnod, with two other owners holding smaller allocations of land. Alnod has been identified as Alnoth, an important citizen of London. He became a Benedictine monk following the loss of his lands following the Norman Conquest.
At the time of the Domesday Book Bletchingley was held by William I’s cousin, Richard de Tonbridge, (Richard FitzGilbert), who consolidated the manor with the neighbouring manor of Chivington. There were 29 households, composed of 23 villagers, 6 smallholder and 7 slaves. This compares to the national average of 15 households and the total population including women and children would have been about 140 people. There were 16 ploughlands and 17 acres of meadow and sufficient woodland to provide mast for 40 pigs.
Interestingly, Bletchingley suffered a 40% drop in value in 1066 from 13 pounds to 8 pounds at the time of its acquisition by Richard. This was a pattern seen in other Domesday records and was probably the result of warfare and civil unrest. The home counties were particularly badly affected because William’s army swept through them following his victory at Hastings to lay waste to the area around the capital, isolating it before he attacked. The abrupt eviction of the three Anglo Saxon owners left the manorial system in chaos before Richard reversed the decline by combining their holdings into a single, aggressively managed estate. The annual value had recovered to 15 pounds and 2 pence by 1086. This made it an exceptionally lucrative asset.
Richard of Tonbridge was also known as Richard de Clare and he commissioned the building of St Mary the Virgin Church. Bletchingley remained with the powerful De Clare family for generations and t
heir coat of arms can be seen in the village sign.
Gilbert de Clare, (later the 5th Earl of Gloucester) and his father Richard de Clare, 3rd Earl of Hertford, played a direct part in the military rebellion against King John. They were among the 25 barons who ensured King John kept his promises under the Magna Carta in 1215. They temporarily lost their lands when they were excommunicated for their rebellion in 1216 but these were restored under John’s son Henry III.
By the late 13th century, their descendant Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester (known as "The Red Earl"), was the wealthiest noble in the realm, commanding vast estates across England, Wales, and Ireland, which allowed him to maintain a private army.
The male line ended in a bloodbath at Bannockburn in 1314 when the 24-year-old Gilbert de Clare, 8th Earl of Gloucester, recklessly charged into the Scottish lines and was killed, causing his massive empire to be split among his three sisters.
Together with the royal castle at Guildford and the Bishop of Winchester’s episcopal palace at Farnham, Bletchingley and Reigate were the main feudal and military centres of 12th century Surrey. We know that it was built by the de Clares in the late 11th century as rubbish deposited soon after its construction contained a coin of William Rufus (1088-1100). The keep was built later, probably between 1152 and 1217. It is a ring motte and bailey castle built on the flat top of the brow of the hill that terminates in a steep slope to the south. The original defences were a D-shaped ringwork approximately 80 x 55m within a kidney shaped outer ward or bailey.
The castle was ‘slighted’, (rendered useless as a military base), by royal forces in 1264 when Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester, joined Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Lewes in a rebellion against Henry III. Archaeologists found signs of severe burning in several places which may mark the end of the building.
Bletchingley first appears in written records as a borough in 1225, though the exact date it was granted this status is not known. This gave Bletchingley the right to self-government and the burgesses who lived there were exempt from feudal labour duties. They paid a fixed cash ‘quit rent’ for their land and could erect and sell on buildings without the lord’s permission.
It is probable that the regular appearance of plots, particularly on the north side of the High Street, dates from this time and the original layout of long, narrow plots remains clearly visible. The market place developed in what is now the wide part of the High Street between Middle Row and the Whyte Harte Inn, and the island of buildings in Middle Row may have started as market stalls later replaced by permanent structures. The market started to fail in the early 14th century and Bletchingley’s failure to develop into a sizeable town may have been related competition from Reigate as well as to the impact of the Black Death of 1348/9.
After the last of the male de Clares died at the Battle of Bannockburn, Bletchingley was held by the Stafford family, later the Earls and Dukes of Buckingham, who held it for nearly two centuries.
The third Duke created a substantial double courtyard manor house known as Bletchingley Place, probably on the site of a previous de Clare manor house as the foundation trenches contained medieval artefacts.
It was described as ‘newly bilded’ in 1521 when the Duke was executed for speaking treasonous words in the gallery there, ‘imagining and compassing the death of the king.’ Wolsey orchestrated his execution to eliminate a powerful political rival who had become the spokesman for nobility excluded from office under the Tudors.
Bletchingley Place was seized by the King and later given as a residence to Anne of Cleves in 1540, following the swift annulment of their marriage.
Bletchingley Place was Anne’s primary home for seven years alongside her other residences of Richmond Palace and Hever Castle. She had a comfortable and independent life here as the ‘King’s Beloved Sister,’ funded by her substantial annual pension.
She actively engaged in the courtly pastimes of the elite, frequently hunting in the estate's extensive deer parks and entertaining high-profile guests.
Two months after Henry’s death Anne had to agree to exchange the estate for the less attractive Penshurst Place in Kent. This allowed her previous steward, the Protestant reformer Sir Thomas Cawarden, to move into Bletchingley Place.
Virtually all of Bletchingley Place was demolished in 1670 by the Earl of Peterborough.
Sir Robert was born the son of a Northamptonshire farmer in in 1629. He was apprenticed to his uncle, a money scrivenor – an early form of investment banker/mortgage broker. After many good property deals, he became a very wealthy man, and served as Lord Mayor and MP for the City of London and later MP for Bletchingley for three terms until his death in 1707.
There is a very fine baroque monument to him and his wife Martha in St Mary’s Church.
Bletchingley began returning two members of parliament regularly from 1295, despite having only a very small number of electors who were the tenants of the lord of the manor and easily encouraged to vote as he or she wished. The 18th century historian of Surrey, Manning and Bray, said that from 1733 elections took place at the White Hart Inn.
Public anger grew about such ‘rotten boroughs,’ which were increasingly hard to defend when fast-growing industrial towns like Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds had no direct representation. Parliament passed the Great Reform Act in 1832 after two attempts and Bletchingley was one of 56 boroughs that lost its representation. Towards the end of its time as a borough, the number of people turning up to vote seldom exceeded ten. Lord Palmerston was one of its two last serving MPs, (eligible because The Act of Union in 1800 allowed Irish Peers to be elected for the House of Commons).
Bletchingley was owned by a wealthy coal owner, Matthew Russell who had bought it for political influence in 1816. With the loss of its two seats, Bletchingley was no longer a financial asset and following Russell’s death it was put up for sale in 1835. The manor and some of the estate was bought be John Perkins, who owned the nearby Pendell Estate the rest bought by smaller landowners, local tenants and tradespeople.
Bletchingley tunnel was built by hundreds of navvies between 1840 and 1842 as part of the original, rather circuitous mainline linking London to Dover via Redhill. The project was directed by the engineer Frederick Walter Simms and its construction was meticulously described in his 1844 textbook, Practical Tunnelling, which became a gold standard for the traditional English method of tunnel excavation.
They are chiefly vertebrae of Megalosauri and Iguanodons, with some smaller reptiles of the same class…The huge primeval lizards must have sported in the waters or roamed along the banks of the great lake or estuary formerly covering the districts of the Wealds of Kent and Surrey. Globe, 2 September 1841
Several newspapers reported that some dinosaur bones were unearthed when digging the cutting forming the entrance of the tunnel. While we can be fairly certain that there were iguanodon bones, Victorian writers tended to use the term ‘Megalosaurus’ as a catch-all label for any large fossil bone that did not look like the herbivorous Iguanodon.
We know that the Bletchingley Tunnel cut through weald clay that was teaming with prehistoric crocodiles. Their bones may be what looked like ‘smaller reptiles of the same class’ to the untrained eye.
The article was, however, quite correct in saying that the area was a massive freshwater floodplain, lake and river system at the time of the iguanodons.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, as nearby Redhill and Reigate were growing strongly as regional economic centres with a wide range of businesses, Bletchingley remained a largely rural economy. Archaeological surveys have found the remains of a substantial hearth or kiln and a sand quarry, both of post Medieval date, on land east of Place Farm, but these were probably for localised use rather than commercial operations. However, high grade silica sand has been extracted at North Park Farm since 1977.
Similarly, local fuller’s earth deposits were never developed at scale. In 1989 the chemical firm Laporte was refused authority to start open-cast fuller’s earth extraction running across the parish borders into Tandridge on environmental and archaeological grounds. Bletchingley’s lack of any other significant economic development has preserved much of its medieval framework into the 21st century.
Open Domesday https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ3250/blechingley/
Domesday Landowners 1066-1086 A-D, https://www.quickgen.net/p/blog-page.html
Hull Domesday Project
https://www.domesdaybook.net/domesday-book/data-terminology/money-values/values
A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 4. (1912), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/surrey/vol4/pp253-265#h3-s3
Village sign, Bletchingley (2021), N Chadwick
Image of Magna Carta King John signing the Magna Carta reluctantly by Michael, Arthur C (d 1945)
Photograph of a cast copper alloy strap mount with the de Clare coat of arms, (2017), The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum
Exploring Surrey’s Past, https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/collections/getrecord/SHHER_2149 and
https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/collections/getrecord/SHHER_1226
Surrey Archaeological Society
https://www.surreyarchaeology.org.uk/content/bletchingley-castle and
https://www.surreyarchaeology.org.uk/content/land-east-of-place-farm-bletchingley
Later Owners of Bletchingley Castle, Dennis Turner, (2014) https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-379-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_98/surreyac098_175-190_turner.pdf
Bletchingley Conservation Area Appraisal,
Britannica, Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Stafford-3rd-Duke-of-Buckingham
Portrait of a Man, probably Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, 16th century painting attributed to the Master of the Brandon Portrait
Betrothal portrait of Anne of Cleves (c. 1539), Louvre, Paris
Practical Tunnelling, FW Simms (1844
https://archive.org/details/practicaltunnel00clargoog/page/n86/mode/2up
Godstone Station, William's Siding and Bletchingley Tunnel,
https://www.derekhayward.co.uk/Tonbridge-to-Redhill/Godstone-Station
Fullers Earth factsheet issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2006)