Very few people will know about Thorpe in the Glebe, a lost medieval Nottinghamshire village that's fate is subject to folklore. The name is derived from the Danish word 'torp', which was a subsidiary settlement or farmstead dependent on a larger village.
It was located to the south of Wysall, on the Leicestershire border. By the time the Domesday Book - a survey of England and parts of Wales - was compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086, the village was merely waste. There is no population recorded, so it appears the area was deserted at this time and subsequently resettled.
It was then known as Thorpe Regis or King's Thorpe. A church was built in the village sometime after 1220, before it assumed the name Thorpe in the Glebe in the 14th century.
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However, climatic changes and the Black Death in the 1340s were thought to have caused the village to take a significant blow. Poor harvests would have been followed by the plague, which wiped out 40 percent of the national population.
Thorpe, along with nearby Stanton on the Wolds and many other settlements, seemed to have become depopulated due to the reduction of able-bodied men. The settlement appeared to be partly enclosed for sheep rearing by 1440, with the transition from crops to livestock resulting in the one-time village having just a handful of dwellings.
According to popular folklore, Thorpe was destroyed either by a hailstorm or as a consequence of the Civil War battle at Willoughby Field in 1648. However, WHO Wolds Historical Organisation says the first is improbable and the second impossible.
Its website reads: "The first is improbable as a primary cause – the damaged houses would have been rebuilt – and the second explanation impossible as by the time of the Civil War there had been no village at Thorpe in the Glebe for nearly 200 years."
It is more likely the settlement's demise is down to depopulation followed by enclosure. The area is now a civil parish of the same name.
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