Spaldwick

Rural village in Cambridgeshire, England

Spaldwick is a village and civil parish in Cambridgeshire, England. Spaldwick lies approximately 6 mile (10 km) west of Huntingdon, near Catworth. Spaldwick is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England. In the village there is a school, preschool, service area (including shop and several food outlets), a church and a public house called The George. The former BT phone box on Royston Avenue has been converted into a Book Exchange.

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. Spaldwick was listed in the Domesday Book in the Hundred of Leightonstone in Huntingdonshire; the name of the settlement was written as Spalduic and Spalduice in the Domesday Book. In 1086 there was just one manor at Spaldwick; the annual rent paid to the lord of the manor in 1066 had been £16 and the rent had increased to £22 in 1086. The Domesday Book does not explicitly detail the population of a place but it records that there were 60 households at Spaldwick. Using these figures then an estimate of the population of Spaldwick in 1086 is that it was within the range of 210 and 300 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 29 ploughlands at Spaldwick in 1086. Its octagonal broach spire has three tiers of lucarne window openings.

Spaldwick School is a small primary school for children aged 4 to 11, with about 168 pupils. It is located in Royston Avenue, Spaldwick.