The settlement of Northorpe has it origins in the late Anglo-Saxon period. The name of the village means the secondary settlement to the north (named in relation to Thurlby), and comes from the Old Norse. It is first so-named from the 13th century. {1} A land holding at Northorpe does appear to be recorded in Domesday Book although it occurs under Thurlby. The dominant landholder of the area at this time is Peterborough Abbey one of their two holdings in Thurlby has been identified by Paul Everson and David Stocker as being at Northorpe. It is their smaller holding, of some 12 bovates with 30 acres of woodland. Paul Everson and David Stocker have analysed the morphology of the settlements of Thurlby and Northorpe and have suggested locations for the Domesday manors. While the larger Peterborough manor probably stood to the east of the Roman Road of King Street around the church. The smaller Peterborough holding, that was probably a manor, was perhaps at the western end of Northorpe. The settlement to the east of this nucleus may well be the sites of peasant crofts within the settlement as a whole. {2}{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. It may well be the Northorpe manor that is held as a tenancy as it seems that the main manor around the church in Thurlby probably remained part of the monastery's demesne lands. {4} Northorpe is not separately recorded in medieval taxation documents but is amalgamated with Thurlby. In 1334 the Lay Subsidy returns assigned a value of £10 19s.11d. to Thurlby-with-Obthorpe, which would have included Northorpe. This total was more than half as much again as the average for the area although this valuation did not include any ecclesiastical land. {5} The population of Northorpe is recorded in 1563 when there were 51 households in Thurlby, and a further 22 in Northorpe, as recorded in the Diocesan returns for that year. Population figures for Thurlby, including Northorpe, in later centuries are in the Thurlby settlement record (PRN 39473). {6} Northorpe, as mapped in the 19th century, is a discrete and separate village and it is only in the 20th century that the settlement merged with Thurlby as the farmland between the villages was built upon. {7}{8}