Fawley

Some Roman graves were discovered in April 1883 on a hill between North and South Fawley. This briefly appeared in medieval records as an ecclesiastical parish of its own and to have had a church in the time of Henry II who confirmed its appropriation to Hurley Priory. The ecclesiastical parish of Fawley once had its own benefice, which following appropriation (which took place before 1086) became a vicarage. However its need for its own minister ceased and the area's Church of England priest today is the rector of Great Shefford ministering to the rural benefice of West Downland. Its patrons were in 1870 Mr. and Mrs. Wroughton. Edmund de Polhampton, lord of the south manor, died in 1353 of…

Fawley was the poor and depressed home of author Thomas Hardy's paternal grandmother, Mary Head; the main character in Jude the Obscure, stonemason Jude Fawley, lived in the fictional village of Marygreen, and a relative, one of Hardy's biographers, links the memories of this woman, who had a very depressing childhood, to the book's bleak start. The house in which she lived is now called Jude Cottage.