Cranborne

Cranborne is a village in Dorset, in the south of England, set on the chalk downland of Cranborne Chase. The settlement dates from Saxon times and appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Creneburne, a name meaning the stream of the cranes. In the tenth century a Benedictine abbey was founded here, later reduced to a priory dependent on Tewkesbury until 1540, and its Norman priory church of St Mary and St Bartholomew still serves as the parish church. Medieval kings and later James I came to hunt on the surrounding downs, and Cranborne Manor House grew out of a royal hunting lodge. The village was once a small agricultural market town and the centre of its hundred, though its importance has since faded. At the 2011 census the parish had 779 inhabitants. It is the birthplace of the theologian Edward Stillingfleet.