Once upon a time Bletchley was a little village on the green. Its name means Blecca's ley or field, but we have no idea who Blaecca was though his name is Saxon. Bletchley was once quite a large parish, but at some time in the Middle Ages, the parishes of Fenny Stratford and later Water Eaton were hacked out of it, leaving the bit around the church and the green as the only part of Bletchley east of Rickley Lane and Church Green Road. If you look across the green you can see some low humps and bumps where the houses stood; when the green was laid out as a park in the 1960s, pieces of fourteenth century pottery were found. You may imagine these houses as low cottages with walls of 'cob' or 'witchert' (rammed clay) having a steep thatched roof with overhanging eaves to keep the rain off the clay walls, and each having a hole in the roof to let out the smoke from the cooking fire. A better sort of house might have had a chimney. The Rector would have lived in a house, perhaps a little better than some of the others, where the Old Rectory stands now, but we don't know what sort of a house it was because the new house of about 1834 covers the place where it stood. The village pond which was at the corner of the green under the rose bed next to the War Memorial was filled in during the 1970s but the water is still there under the flower bed. Across Church Green Road stands Free Folk Cottage, which although it is later in date - probably of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century - gives an idea of how one of the better houses in the village may have looked, though you have to remember that glass windows were rare and expensive in the Middle Ages, so most people would only have had wooden shutters when they wanted to keep out the wind or the wet. In the dip behind Free Folk Cottage the village stream ran down the hill towards the Eight Bells, which of course was named after the bells in the church. It was rather grand to have a ring of eight bells in your church, so Bletchley Church was considered to be one of the best churches for some miles around.