Blackmore
Blackmore is a village in Essex, England. It is located approximately 3 miles east of Chipping Ongar and 4 miles north of Brentwood. The village is in the parish of Blackmore, Hook End and Wyatts Green in the Brentwood district and the parliamentary constituency of Brentwood & Ongar. In 2018 it had an estimated population of 826.
History
It is thought that the name Blackmore was introduced in the Middle Ages as a reference to 'Black Marsh' or 'Black Swamp'.The origins of the Priory Church of St Laurence date back to 1114 and marks the site of a former Augustinian Priory, dissolved during the reign of Henry VIII in 1525. The church is the original building and is now the parish church. It has one of the last remaining all-wooden steeples in England which was added around 1400. The site still shows signs of the original moat. The village itself is believed to have migrated to a location closer to the chapel of the Priory from around Fingrith Hall during the mediaeval period.
Jericho Priory, on the site adjacent to the church and still within the moated area, was built in the 18th century on the site of an earlier 16th-century building which was believed to be the country retreat of Henry VIII and where, in 1520, his 'natural son', Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, was born.
Other old buildings in the village include the 15th- 16th-century Bull Inn, a traditional Essex timber-framed house, and Fingreth Hall, in the north of the parish, where Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer during the Elizabethan era lived. Fingrith was recorded in the Domesday Book as 'Phingaria' which was a Latinised form of its original Anglo-Saxon name, Fingreth, meaning 'the stream of the people of Fin'.