Windlesham - History

History

The neighbourhood has yielded bronze implements, now in the Archaeological Society's Museum, Guildford, and a certain number of neolithic flints..

Windlesham was once a small community within Windsor Great Park, built as a remote farming settlement around undulating heath, similar to Sunninghill.

This corner of the county appears, from absence of notice in Domesday, to have been very sparsely inhabited. Of Windlesham, Malden wrote:

The old road had been the source of great prosperity in Bagshot till it was superseded by the railway. Thirty coaches a day passed through, and there were many inns, since closed. The most interesting history of the place is in connexion with Windsor Forest, and its bailiwick in Surrey. The tenure of Bagshot in the Red Book of the Exchequer is per serjentiam veltrariae, i.e. providing a leash of hounds. The later history is full of the exploits of highwaymen, who found the wild country hereabouts specially favourable for their purposes. The Inclosure Act of 1812 inclosed much of Bagshot Heath, and also inclosed the common fields of Windlesham. (fn. 3) Inclosure had begun before, for in 1768 the lords of the manors and the freeholders gave land inclosed from the waste for charitable purposes.

Windlesham Manor appears among the manors granted to Westminster by Edward the Confessor in his foundation charter. It was apparently transferred to the small local Broomhall Convent at an unknown date.

Newark Priory had a grant of land in Windlesham in 1256, and had the advowson (right to appoint the vicar) of the church. Joan Rawlyns, Prioress of Broomhall, made a voluntary surrender of the property of her house in 1522 before the 1538 Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the next year Windlesham was granted to St. John's College, Cambridge, who still held it in 1911

In 1911 the village was due to the heath, see Surrey Heath, described as almost entirely modern, in much the same way as Wentworth, Surrey's landscape was tamed approximately at the turn of the 20th century, being naturally heather, gorse and fern and ideal for grass and laid out evergreen trees.

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