The settlement of Thurlby has it origins in the late Anglo-Saxon period. The name of the village means Thorulf's farmstead, or village, and comes from the Old Danish personal name 'Thorulf' and Old Danish 'by'. {1} The settlement is first recorded in the Domesday Book when there are four land-holdings recorded. The dominant landholder at this time is Peterborough Abbey that held two of the holdings, probably both manors, that they had held since before the Norman Conquest. The larger manor had 29 bovates of arable land and 20 acres of meadow and 80 acres of woodland. The smaller holding was of some 12 bovates with 30 acres of woodland. There were, in addition two smaller holdings, each of 4 bovates, associated with manors in Bourne. The minimum population in 1086 was 36 people, each probably the head of a household. The possessions of Peterborough Abbey in Domesday show a highly developed manorial system in operation on manors such as those at Thurlby. {2} Paul Everson and David Stocker have analysed the morphology of the settlements of Thurlby and Northorpe and have suggested locations for the Domesday manors. There are five separate clusters of settlement that can be identified from the enclosure award map of the early 19th century, although today the gaps between them have been filled by modern buildings. The larger Peterborough manor probably stood to the east of the Roman road of King Street around the church. They argue that this part of the village was a planned settlement created in about AD1100 with the church as an integrated component. It is known that the church was dedicated in AD1112 (see PRN 33191). The smaller Peterborough manor was possibly at the western end of Northorpe. The settlement nucleus at the west end of High Street, at the junction with Station Road, Obthorpe Lane and Northorpe Lane, appears to be formed around a rectangular green. This, together with the other two clusters in Northorpe and Thurlby, are suggested to be the sites of peasant crofts within the settlement as a whole. {3} The Peterborough Abbey holdings were held (in part) by their tenant Brian de la Mare in 1212 and the tenancy remained in the family with Geoffrey de la Mare holding it in 1303, and in 1346 it was held by his son. {4} In 1318 Geoffrey de la Mare was granted the right to hold a market at Thurlby, indicating the increasing wealth of the parish. There was also an annual three day fair in late September. {5} In 1334 the Lay Subsidy returns assigned a value of £10 19s.11d. to Thurlby-with-Obthorpe which was more than half as much again as the average for the area although this valuation did not include any ecclesiastical land. {6} The manor of Thurlby that was held by Peterborough Abbey remained in their hands until the dissolution of the monasteries. It was valued at £31 4s.2½d. in 1535, when it was one of their most valuable manors. {7} The Thurlby estates of Peterborough Abbey were, after the dissolution, granted by Henry VIII to the Bishop of Peterborough. The Bishop surrendered them to the Queen during the reign of Elizabeth I who re-granted them to William Cecil, Lord Burghley. {8} The population of Thurlby appears to have fluctuated somewhat from the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1563 there were 51 households in Thurlby, and a further 22 in Northorpe, as recorded in the Diocesan returns for that year. {9} In 1603 there were 325 communicants from the parish recorded as attending the church. {10} In the early eighteenth century (about 1705) there were 100 families in Thurlby as recorded in two of the Diocesan censuses. {11} By 1801 the population had reached 508 people. The population then rose over the next seventy years to 844 in 1871. The population dropped during the latter part of the nineteenth century to stand at 726 in 1901. {12}