House Clearance in Bookham

Centuries before the Norman Conquest, much of Bookham (Boc-ham, the settlement at the beech trees) had been given to Chertsey abbey by a Saxon ruler of Surrey. Both Great and Little Bookham, like many other villages on this side of the North Downs, are sited along the narrow band of fertile sandy gravel soils between the open chalk grassland (once colonised by beech woods, then largely
cleared by grazing animals) and the heavy oakwood clays (good for timber for fuel and houses). Here clean water was easily available from periodic springs or shallow wells. Although the ridgeway would have been the drier route, it was more exposed in
bad weather. By 1086 Great Bookham contained 36 households, a church and a watermill, which must have been on the River Mole, an hour’s walk from the village centre.

The abbot of Chertsey reorganised Great Bookham into a single-street village with houses occupying the whole width of each plot, gardens reached from a back lane. Gates across the roads stopped animals from straying into the village. The early Norman church still stands at one end of the High Street, in the middle of a large graveyard.

The monastic grange (to collect produce for the abbey), which once stood behind the church, has vanished. The other end of the High Street widened into a market place: King Henry III granted Bookham a charter for a weekly market and an annual fair in 1243. Surrounding the village were the intermingled strips of the arable open fields, beyond which were the great common wastes of Bookham Common and Ranmore Common.