Chipperfield | |
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Chipperfield Common, The Two Brewers public house, war memorial and crossroads. |
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Chipperfield shown within Hertfordshire | |
Population | 1,753 (2011 Census) |
OS grid reference | TL043016 |
District | |
Shire county | |
Region | |
Country | England |
Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
Post town | KINGS LANGLEY |
Postcode district | WD4 |
Dialling code | 01923 |
Police | Hertfordshire |
Fire | Hertfordshire |
Ambulance | East of England |
EU Parliament | East of England |
UK Parliament | |
Chipperfield is a village and civil parish in the Dacorum district of Hertfordshire, England, about 5 miles southwest of Hemel Hempstead and 5 miles north of Watford. The rural parish includes the hamlet of Tower Hill.
The village centre is a large green on the edge of nearby Chipperfield common.
It stands on a chalk plateau at the edge of the Chiltern Hills, some 130 to 160 metres above sea level.
The parish has been included within the Metropolitan Green Belt.
Prehistoric activity in the area is testified by the presence of two tumuli on the common. Besides being burial mounds these may have designated the boundary of lands worked by Bronze Age communities in the Gade and Chess valleys.
For centuries Chipperfield was an outlying settlement of Kings Langley consisting only of scattered houses. The first documentary evidence of the name is found in 1316, when Edward II bequeathed ‘the Manor House of Langley the closes adjoining together with the vesture of Chepervillewode for Fewel and other Necessaries’ to the Dominican Black Friars.
The name is probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon ceapere meaning a trader together with feld meaning field. This suggests that there was some form of market or trading of goods here in early times.
The Manor House, on the east side of the common, is a late medieval hall house but was extensively rebuilt by Thomas Gulston, before 1591. It is a grade II listed building.
By the 1830s Chipperfield was large enough to warrant the building of both Anglican and Baptist churches and became a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1848.
For a number of years the Lords of the Manor were the Blackwell family who were benefactors to the village. Two of the family's sons were killed during World War One. Second Lieutenant Charles Blackwell (4th battalion, Royal Fusiliers) was wounded at the Second Battle of Ypres and died in France in July 1915. Lieutenant William Gordon Blackwell (8th battalion, Royal Fusiliers), the younger of the two brothers, was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme on 5 October 1916. As a memorial the Blackwell family gave the village the village club, which remained a club until quite recently. It's now been renamed Blackwells and it's both a bar and cafe open to the public next to the common.