The ancient parish of Passenham occupied acrage of the south of Cleley hundred where from the east adjoins Buckingham by a separating river Great Ouse. Opposite to the southwest runs Wicken to King's Brook, at the northwest is Oxfordshire parish of Lillingstone Lovell and transferred to Buckinghamshire in the 1830s. On the northeast from these, the boundary with Potterspury and a detached portion of Cosgrove, Watling Street separates Passenham and Furtho. At the very south end of the parish, the Ouse valley lies several feet above sea level- about as much as a dune. Iron Age settlement has been found on the Boulder Clay in two places in the extreme west of the parish, in East Ashalls Coppice and West Ashalls Coppice, the latter also occupied in the Roman period. The earliest post Roman settlement in the parish was presumably at the site later occupied by St. Guthlác's church on the left bank of the Ouse about a mile upstream from Stony Stratford bridge where in Old Stratford the town is called Bucks. A village developed here, including a manor house, water-mill and a few other houses, on either side of a lane leading off the Buckingham road, but the main settlement in the parish, by the 16th century, was at Passenham, on the main road about a mile to the west, at a junction with the road to Wicken, where the Buckingham road crosses Kings Brook.
The only community within the hundred mentioned in pre-Conquest historical sources is Passenham, which occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 921. Its estates which extended beyond a single parish. Cosgrove and Furtho remained a single township until modern times and were presumably once one estate, which at an earlier date may have included the later parish of Potterspury. Roade, Ashton and Hartwell formed a single medieval parish and may originally have been one estate. The outer boundaries of Grafton Regis and Alderton follow natural features, which possibly suggests that they too were once a single unit. In 921 Edward the Elder had the fortress at Towcester occupied and fortified. The same summer the Danes from Northampton and Leicester besieged Towcester but failed to take it. in the autumn Edward went with the levies of Wessex to Passenham and encamped there while Towcester was being reinforced with a stone wall. While there he received the submission of the Danes from Northampton. A charter of 937, believed in the past to refer to an estate whose bounds appear to correspond to those of the townships of Puxley and Deanshanger within Passenham parish, in fact relates to Water Newton (Hunts.).
The meeting place for Cleley hundred has long been identified as a well in the parish of Potterspury, near the boundary with Furtho, at which several footpaths meet, whose name in modern times has become misspelt as 'Cheley'. There appears never to have been a settlement at the spot. It lies within the manor held by Henry de Ferrers in 1086, which may support the idea that he also held the hundred. In the later Middle Ages the hundred court was held at the Woodvilles' manor of Grafton. In 1301 50 households in the vill of Passenham (which must include Deanshanger, Puxley and Old Stratford) were assessed to the lay subsidy.
 | Cleley
hundred occupies some 25,000 acres (about 40 square miles) in the extreme south
of Northamptonshire. Together with the adjoining parishes of Whittlebury and Silverstone
(in Greens Norton hundred), it forms a projection of the county into Buckinghamshire,
which flanks the area on three sides. To the north, Cleley abuts Wymersley hundred.
On the south and east much of the county boundary is formed by the river Great
Ouse or its tributary the Tove, which, together with numerous smaller streams
that flow generally east or south-east into one of the two, drain the district.
All the places in Cleley which later emerge as ecclesiastical parishes (or, in the case of Ashton and Hartwell, as parochial chapelries in the parish of Roade) occur in Domesday Book, which conversely does not name either Yardley Gobion (in Potterspury) or Shutlanger (in Stoke Bruerne) which later became separate townships within their respective parishes, nor any of the smaller places which, although not townships, had their own open fields, such as Deanshanger in Passenham, Hulcote in Easton Neston, or Heathencote in Paulerspury. Field investigation has also identified in several parishes, notably Hartwell, yet smaller medieval hamlets, without fields of their own, which may not be named in any historical source. There are no lost Domesday place-names in the hundred. |
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Of the places mentioned in Domesday, only Easton Neston, Furtho and Passenham are on clay, and it may be significant that all three were later deserted, whereas Hulcote (in Easton Neston) and Deanshanger (in Passenham), which both stand on limestone, were not. Some villages, notably Grafton Regis, remained confined to an exposure of limestone, whereas others, for example Stoke Bruerne, appear to have expanded onto heavier clay soil during the Middle Ages. Assuming that the position of the church indicates the site of the earliest post-Roman settlement in each village, the majority appear to have been established on lighter soil, where a stream has exposed the Oolitic Limestone, rather than the Boulder Clay | |
| Like the other hundreds in the county, Cleley is first mentioned in the Northamptonshire geld roll of c. 1075. In 1086 three Northamptonshire hundreds (apart from the eight held by Peterborough Abbey) were in private hands and it is possible that Cleley was also, since it may already have been held with Potterspury by Henry de Ferrers. All the parishes cultivated at least some of their land in common in the Middle Ages, and in those which contained more than one village each community had its own open fields. There is only one instance of two parishes sharing a field system, at Cosgrove and Furtho, where there was also intermixture with the fields of Potterspury. Although Cosgrove and Furtho were distinct parishes from at least the 13th century, they shared a constable throughout the Middle Ages (and were thus taxed as a single unit) and presumably once formed a single estate. None of the manors in Cleley became the home of a major medieval landholder and some lacked a resident lord for part or all of the Middle Ages. Of the families seated in the hundred, the most important in the later medieval period were the Woodvilles of Grafton, who gradually accumulated land in the district from the 13th century and rose dramatically to national prominence in the second half of the 15th century, only to suffer disastrously from the political upheavals of the period, their line ending with the death of the last Earl Rivers in 1491. |  |