Ownership
Following the Norman conquest the Monarch owned all land and granted it to nobles as tenants, who were obliged to provide military support. The nobles in turn, offered land to sub tenants, who had obligations to the noble. Variations on this hierarchy were in place until the 1660 Tenures Abolition Act. In Bradwell the de Wolverton family was dominant from the 11th century until 1351 when the last male de Wolverton died. Following marriage to a female member of that family the Longeville family came to own Bradwell until the conclusion of the Civil War, 1642-51. The family was Royalist and the victorious Parliamentarians fined those who had supported the Crown. Bradwell was sold. It passed through various hands before in 1666 becoming the property of Joseph Alson, who was created Baron of Chelsea and Bradwell Abbey in 1688. The Alston family (after whom Alston Drive is named) gifted a number of items to St Lawrence Church and in the 1600s and early 1700s took responsibility for the restoration and enlargement of the Bradwell Abbey house. The new facade had eight windows, of which only two remain, but traces of the others can be seen in the stonework. There was also an avenue of elms. The site became known as Abbey Farm and was tenanted, with an absentee landlord, until 1950 when the farm was purchased by Mr G. Field. It was compulsorily purchased in 1971 by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation Development Corporation.
The landscape
In the early 1500s there was a medieval ridge-and-furrow field system around Bradwell but links to those outside the parish were poor. To maintain the roads an act of 1555 (and not abolished until 1835) imposed an obligation on parishioners to do four, later six, consecutive days’ unpaid repair work every year. The first Turnpike Act was passed by Parliament in 1663. This allowed tolls to be collected on maintained stretches of road. Between 1695 and 1706 Parliament empowered the men held responsible for maintaining the roads, the Justices of the Peace to establish trusts to further turnpike roads. This was widened to include local men of substance and in 1706 the Hockliffe and Woburn Turnpike Trust was established. It administered the London-Chester road between Fornhill and Stony Stratford. This utilised Watling Street with a toll gate built on Watling Street in the south-western extreme of Bradwell Abbey land in 1740. In 1755 the trustees authorised their surveyor ‘to pick or gather stone in Bradwell fields for the repair or mending of the turnpike road’. In 1771 gravel was added. Nevertheless in 1794 surveyors James William and Jacob Malcolm described the Fenny Stratford to Stony Stratford road as ‘miserable indeed’. Trusts built, maintained and administered around 30,000 miles of road with about 8,000 toll-gates. They were an important feature of the landscape and one of the central pillars which supported industrialisation.
An early example of powered production was the windmill, an idea said to have been brought to England by the Crusaders. While upper reaches of Bradwell Brook were unsuitable for a watermill there was (according to a will dated 1558) a windmill to the south-east of the village. There is further evidence in place names Windmill Furlong in 1648, a Windmill Field in the mid-1600s and a field called Windmill Ridgeway in 1839.