Waresley is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Waresley-cum-Tetworth, in Cambridgeshire, England. Waresley lies approximately south of Huntingdon and south-east of the town of St Neots. Waresley is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England.
At the time of the 2001 census, the population of Waresley parish was 293. At the time of the 2011 Census the population was included in the Civil Parish of Little Gransden.
History
In 1085 William the Conqueror ordered that a survey should be carried out across his kingdom to discover who owned which parts and what it was worth. The survey took place in 1086 and the results were recorded in what, since the 12th century, has become known as the Domesday Book. Starting with the king himself, for each landholder within a county there is a list of their estates or manors; and, for each manor, there is a summary of the resources of the manor, the amount of annual rent that was collected by the lord of the manor both in 1066 and in 1086, together with the taxable value.
Waresley was listed in the Domesday Book in the Hundred of Toseland in Huntingdonshire; the name of the settlement was written as Wederesle, Wedreslei and Wedresleie in the Domesday Book. In 1086 there were three manors at Waresley; the annual rent paid to the lords of the manors in 1066 had been £10.5 and the rent had fallen to £8.6 in 1086.
The Domesday Book does not explicitly detail the population of a place but it records that there were 28 households at Waresley. There is no consensus about the average size of a household at that time; estimates range from 3.5 to 5.0 people per household. Using these figures then an estimate of the population of Waresley in 1086 is that it was within the range of 98 and 140 people.
The Domesday Book uses a number of units of measure for areas of land that are now unfamiliar terms, such as hides and ploughlands. In different parts of the country, these were terms for the area of land that a team of eight oxen could plough in a single season and are equivalent to ; this was the amount of land that was considered to be sufficient to support a single family. By 1086, the hide had become a unit of tax assessment rather than an actual land area; a hide was the amount of land that could be assessed as £1 for tax purposes. The survey records that there were 8.5 ploughlands at Waresley in 1086 and that there was the capacity for a further six ploughlands. In addition to the arable land, there was of meadows and of woodland at Waresley.
The tax assessment in the Domesday Book was known as geld or danegeld and was a type of land-tax based on the hide or ploughland. It was originally a way of collecting a tribute to pay off the Danes when they attacked England, and was only levied when necessary. Following the Norman Conquest, the geld was used to raise money for the King and to pay for continental wars; by 1130, the geld was being collected annually. Having determined the value of a manor's land and other assets, a tax of so many shillings and pence per pound of value would be levied on the land holder. While this was typically two shillings in the pound the amount did vary; for example, in 1084 it was as high as six shillings in the pound. For the manors at Waresley the total tax assessed was ten geld.
By 1086 there was already a church and a priest at Waresley.
The name Waresley probably means 'woodland clearing of a man called Wether or Wær. ' In 1801, Waresley's population stood at 195 people and in 1901, it was 216.