Normandy is a civil parish aussie pie co 16. Guildford in Surrey, England and the name of the largest village in that parish.
Hunts Hill Road and Glaziers Lane, the parish also includes Christmas Pie, Willey Green, Wyke, Flexford and Pinewoods. Flexford in the south was once called Flaxford, itself a corruption of “flax vard”, meaning flax meadows by a stream. The ancient industry here was the creation of linen from flax. Flexford has a population of 1,163. Flexford’s businesses include a garage, and carpentry and roofing contractor firm.
Christmas Pie adjoins Flexford on a wide boundary. Christmas Pie owes its curious name to property owned by a prominent local family named Christmas. There are many references to this family in the court records of the manor of Cleygate which date back to 1513 in the reign of King Henry VIII. The western part of the parish is Wyke.
The Domesday Book mentioned a hall which is thought to have been where East Wyke Farm now stands and where remains of Surrey White Ware pottery have been found. This more remote western area developed around the beerhouse called the Nightingale in the far west of the parish in the nineteenth century. The woods from which it derives its name are only to be found to the north of the hamlet and this hamlet developed in isolation from the rest of the parish and is still separated from the other hamlets by open land. Willey Green is in part at the lowest point of the parish and was once prone to flooding. Being so located made this area damp and ideal conditions for willow trees to grow and this is where the hamlet derives its name, as the place where willows grow. Westwood was once a western locality of Normandy, like Willey Green within Worplesdon, but has almost fallen out of use.
As a parish, the history of Normandy is the combined history of its constituent hamlets which in modern times include Christmas Pie, Flexford, Willey Green, Wyke, Pinewoods and Normandy proper. The earliest known occurrence of the name Normandy is from 1604, when the court records of the Manor of Cleygate refer to Normandy Causeway, previously called Frimsworth Causeway. The same records in the same year also mention a messuage with a garden in Normandy. The derivation of the name is uncertain. The village has no direct connection with the Duchy of Normandy, and it is not mentioned in Domesday Book. There is evidence on the parishes eastern border of Romano-British occupation in the form of temple remains.
In late Saxon England the lands were within the holdings of Earl Godwin, father of King Harold Godwinson. By the time the final part of the Manor of Cleygate was sold to the War Department in 1876, most of the Manor had been sold to private individuals, and that included much of what is now the parish of Normandy. The three private estates making up the parish were those of Henley Park, Westwood and Normandy Park. Into the twentieth century Normandy retained its agricultural base. The locality of Normandy was considered for the site of a “New Town” to be called “New Norman” in the 1943 Town and Country Plan produced by the Surrey Federation of Labour Parties.
This was the first outbreak of its kind in the UK for six years. In its rural setting, many footpaths, bridleways and other small roads suitable for horse riding, cycling and walking criss-cross the parish. Normandy is the start point of the Christmas Pie trail which leads into Guildford through woods, commons and meadows. Normandy has an annual Guy Fawkes Night firework display located in a field at the back of The Elms Centre on Glaziers Lane.