Wymersley Benefice  of Cogenhoe and Great Houghton  and Little Houghton with Brafield on the Green Home

Wymersley: the same Benefice with a new name

The present Benefice was created in 1997 with the name The Benefice of Cogenhoe and Great Houghton and Little Houghton with Brafield on the Green.  As this is quite a mouthful and will not fit in many online forms we decided to find a shorter and more memorable name.  Although the legal name of the Benefice is as above, for most purposes we will now be known simply as Wymersley Benefice.


Why Wymersley? Long before the days of District and Borough Councils, in the days of William the Conqueror, Counties were divided in administrative areas called hundreds (each consisting of approximately 100 dwellings). Our four parishes were the central four of the original thirteen parishes that comprised the Wymersley Hundred, and the original meeting place for the court of the Hundred was a field called Wymersley Bush in Little Houghton parish, near where Lodge Farm is now. The name persists in our parishes today with the road name Wymersley Close in Great Houghton and “Wymersley Bush”, the pen name of a contributor to the Cogenhoe Parish magazine.

  

 You can find more history of the Hundred in www.british-history.ac.uk