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Fetcham
Fetcham
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Fetcham

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Fetcham

Fetcham is a suburban village in the Mole Valley district, in Surrey, England west of the town of Leatherhead, on the other side of the River Mole and has a mill pond, springs and an associated nature reserve. The housing, as with adjacent Great Bookham, sits on the lower slopes of the North Downs north of Polesden Lacey (NT). Fetcham Grove has Leatherhead and the village's main leisure centre and football club, between the two settlements. Fetcham has two short parades of shops and services, several sports teams and parks and a small number of large pubs and food premises.

Neighbouring Bookham and Leatherhead have railway stations and a junction of the M25 London Orbital Motorway is a 3-mile (4.8-km) journey from it passing alongside the River Mole beyond a brief upland made up of most of Fetcham's remaining farms and wooded Great Bookham Common demarcating Fetcham's northern border. The northern few square miles and the larger North Downs are protected Green Belt, forming a buffer between Stoke D'Abernon (the south of Cobham post town) and Dorking respectively.

The name Fetcham is derived from the Anglo-Saxon "Fecca's ham" – Fecca's settlement. Fetcham lay within the Copthorne hundred.

Indeed, there is evidence that there were even earlier settlements, with the discovery of Stone and Bronze Age tools and Roman artefacts, as well as three ancient burial grounds.

Fetcham appears in Domesday Book of 1086 as Feceham. It was held partly by William the Conqueror; partly by Richard from the Bishop of Bayeux partly by Oswald the Thegn. Its Domesday assets were: 7 hides; 5½ mills worth 17s; 10½ ploughs; 2 oxen; 30 acres (12 ha) of meadow; woodland, herbage and pannage worth 23 hogs. It rendered £10 10s 0d per year to its feudal system overlords per year. Fetcham, therefore, was referenced in the Domesday survey as three manors; one known as King's Manor was probably Fetcham Park; another was given to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux after the Norman conquest. The third was an Augustinian foundation from Merton Priory, at Cannon Court, which Henry VIII dissolved in 1538.

Its small manorial farming community numbered 176 in the survey, but halved as a result of the Black Death in 1349. In the first half of the nineteenth century the population was still only around 370. In the 1931 census it had reached 1,318 and by 1972 was 7,331.

St Mary's Church has been a place of Christian worship for over 1000 years. Built during Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods, it is probably on the site of an even earlier timber church. There are many hints of its past in its structure. These include the south-west quoin of the nave, and a single splay window high on the south wall with traces of Roman brick as well as arches that are presumed to pre-date 1066.

In 1951 the civil parish had a population of 4178. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished.

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