PRN 13698 The settlement is very dispersed and therefore this record has been shown spatially as a point. The name Brothertoft is thought to have first been used around 1531. The name is thought to derive from an Old Danish personal name 'Bothir' and from the Old Norse meaning curtilage. {1} Brothertoft is in the wapentake of Kirton and was not mentioned in Domesday Book. {2} The village maintained a small but consistent population during the nineteenth century, in 1801 the population stood at 102 it rose slightly over the next century and in 1901 stood at 137. {3} White’s Directory records 123 inhabitants in 1856 and continues that the people 'where the most active rioters against the Enclosure Act of Holland Fen, on which they claimed almost unrestrained right of pasturage, fowling and fishing, but many of them lived to see their folly, in attempting to prevent a great public improvement, which ultimately benefited the poor as well as the rich'. {4} It has been suggested that Brothertoft or Toft was formerly a farming estate (vaccaria) of the abbey of Swineshead. {5} The Church at Brothertoft between 1705 and 1723 had no church minister or endowment, it only had a service every other Sunday, or later on only once a month where the officiating minister was paid 5 shillings by the parishioners. {6} Mr J. Cartwright of Brothertoft started a woad mill in the eighteenth century. This was possibly the first woad-mill that was built as a permanent structure. {7} Mr J. Cartwright 'the father of reform' built Brothertoft Hall and set up a woad processing plant on the North of the Forty Foot Drain, accompanied by a long row of cottages for the labourers. The settlement was called 'Isatica' which is Latin for woad. The settlement was short lived. {8}