Sherfield on Loddon

The village isn't in Domesday, because in 1086 it was part of the manor of Odiham. Henry II granted it to William Fitz Aldelin around 1167, and he's thought to have built the first manor house on the moated site beside the church, which is why the church stands a mile from the village. The village itself grew up to the north in the fourteenth century, round the common. The manor passed to the Warblingtons and by marriage to the Puttenhams, was split and sold in two lots in 1572, and in 1838 the Duke of Wellington, from Stratfield Saye up the road, bought the estate.

The green is what's left of the common grazing. Until Victorian times the parish had a hundred and fourteen acres of pasture and hay rights across Hodgemoor, Little Wild Moor, the Whitmarsh, Boar Meadow and the Green, and the Green is the only one still open. There were about forty houses round it in 1900. By the 1920s it had been let go, and in 1972 the parish council laid it out for cricket, football and tennis, with the play areas. Most of the houses round it are eighteenth and nineteenth century, and a large part of the village has been a conservation area since 1981.

St Leonard's is fourteenth century under a shingled broach spire, almost wholly rebuilt in 1866 and the tower in 1872, with brasses of 1590 and 1595 inside and pews that came from the redundant church at Stratfield Turgis. There's been a mill at Longbridge for something like eight hundred years. The last one ground until 1977, burnt in 1991 and opened as a pub in 1996 with the wheel restored, and it still turns on demonstration days. Sherfield Manor, east of the Basingstoke road, was rebuilt in 1898 and has been a school since 1947. The Reading road through the village was turnpiked in 1718, and the bypass of 1974 took the traffic back out of it.