Hartley Wintney
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Hartley Wintney is a village in the county of Hampshire in England, recorded in the 13th century as Hertleye Wynteneye which means "the clearing in the forest where the deer graze by Winta’s island". Winta was probably a Saxon who owned the island in the marshes where a priory of Cistercian nuns was founded in the middle of the 12th century. Today, the village is in the Hart district council.
Although Roman settlement here before Saxon times cannot be proved, there were Roman settlements not far away at Odiham and Silchester. Before Roman times the area was probably fairly heavily wooded with a lake and a marshy area. A small settlement around a wooden church in the vicinity of St Mary’s Church would possibly have existed in Saxon times. A deer park, which stretched from Odiham to the outskirts of the settlement and to the north, was used for 600 years by Royalty and others for hunting and the wood was used for fuel.
The village would have been included in the Hundred of Odiham in the Domesday Book of 1086. It was part of King Harold’s royal estate at Odiham and after 1066 it became King William’s land.
In medieval times Odiham was a settlement of some size and importance. About 100 years after the conquest the lands comprising Hartley Wintney became a separate manor owned by the Fitz-Peters family; this conquest. This family subsequently gave land to the Cistercians to found a Priory of Nuns.
During the second world war, the village was the home of Field Marshal Alan Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke); Viscount Alanbrooke remained in the village until his death in 1963; his younger son, the third Viscount Alanbrooke still lives in the village. Field Marshal Brooke is buried in the village's St Mary's Churchyard, next to the remains of his daughter who was killed in a horse riding accident.
In 1831, the village had a population of 1139, in 2004, the ward has a population of 4954 and is expected to only increase to 5022 by 2008. The village is twinned with Saint Savin near Poitiers, France and with Malle, famous for Westmalle beer, near Antwerp in Belgium. [1] The Hartley Wintney Preservation Society has published "The Old Village of Hartley Wintney" by the local historian, David Gorsky, now in its fifth edition, which describes walks in the area with detailed points of historical interest on route. [2]
