The History of Bramley Village

Taken from the Parish Council website

Bramley is on the Roman road from Silchester to Chichester and is known to have been inhabited from pre-Roman times. Towards Sherfield there is an area known as Bullsdown Camp. This was a ten acre space surrounded by a series of defensive ditches and mounds, where the people would come with their animals to escape from attack. Even the Romans found it hard to capture such camps. With the nearby Roman settlement at Silchester, there are the remains of a Romano British villa.

In Saxon times the Bramley area was not so much a village as a collection of farming homesteads based at Latchmere Green, the area around the church, Stocks Green and Bramley Green. There was a church on the present site in Saxon times and the Manor of Bramley is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Following the Norman Conquest in 1066 the Manor of Bramley, along with fifty others in Hampshire, was given to the De Port family who governed their lands from their principal manor at nearby Old Basing. The other great landowners who appeared in the 1350s were the Brocas family, so all the land was held by the Manor of Bramley and Beaurepaire Park. The inhabitants were their tenants. read more here