What is the origin of the name Sandringham?

Answer 1

Sandringham is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Sant Dersingham", the sandy part of Dersingham, subsequently shortened to Sandringham. There is evidence of a residence on the present site of the House as early as 1296; prehistoric flint tools have been found in the area and there are remains of a Roman villa quite close to nearby Appleton Farm. From the 16th century the area passed through two families, the Cobbes who held the land from 1517 and the Hostes who followed in 1686. The house which the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, found at Sandringham was a plain Georgian structure with a white stucco exterior, built in the second half of the 18th century by Cornish Henley, whose wife was a member of the Hoste family. Henley died before the house was completed and his son eventually sold it to a neighbour, John Motteux, who had first arrived in England as a Huguenot refugee in 1685. Motteux bequeathed it in his will to his friend Charles Spencer Cowper, the stepson of Viscount Palmerston who was Prime Minister at the time.