"Hurst" was in fact the principal local name for several hundred years, applying to two important houses, one on each side of the Woking Road at its junction with Clay Lane, with their estates occupying most of the area of the modern village. (This name continues in use today at Hurst Farm and Hurst View.)

An estate map drawn in 1686 depicts three further buildings, while another four which can still be found in today's village were clearly built before that date but were omitted from the map only because they did not belong to the owner of the estate.

Thus in 1686 the area apparently contained nine dwellings, apart from any small cottages which may have disappeared without leaving any physical or documentary traces. All nine buildings can be identified on the OS map of 1816. Two of the nine were demolished in the early years of the 20th century. One of these, which we may call the Old House, stood at the village cross-roads and the other, south-east of Jacobs Well Road, was Watts Farm.

The remaining seven are still occupied today. Using their modern names they are Willow Grange and Burpham Court House (originally the two Hurst houses), Watts Cottage, Queen Anne Farm, Jacobs Well Cottage, Queen Hythe and Stringers Barn.

The village began to appear more than a hundred years later than the name it eventually adopted. At first it gradually started to extend almost solely along Jacobs Well Road towards Guildford. Major development was delayed until after the Second World War and now it comprises over 450 homes with a population of around a thousand.

It is situated on the northern limits of the Borough of Guildford, virtually entirely within, or on, the perimeter of a triangle bounded by the Woking Road (A320), Jacobs Well Road and Clay Lane. The latter (which is clearly shown on John Norden's 1607 map of Windsor Forest) formed part of an ancient route from Burpham across the River Wey to Worplesdon. Thanks to the maintenance of the Green Belt the village is completely surrounded by farmland and commons.
Click on the sketch below to see an interactive map.

Although there are some shops and a Post Office near its geographical centre, the focus of community life is the Village Hall some distance away close to the historic origin of the village name. The absence of a church or school, or even a public house, indicates that it was originally a scattered community and, sure enough, around the fringes can be found half a dozen farmhouses which date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Since the village only came into existence comparatively recently it may be of interest to explain how this locality has been described at various times.

Surrey means "south region" and originally was probably the southern part of a Saxon kingdom occupying part of the huge forest which once spread across southern England. This region was subdivided into "hundreds", perhaps so-called because they each contained one hundred families. One of the thirteen hundreds of Surrey was the Hundred of Woking which was in turn divided into a number of Lordships, or Manors. Those of principal concern to us were the Manor of Burpham, the Manor of Worplesdon, and the nearby Manor of Sutton.

The area which today comprises the village of Jacobs Well was in the Manor of Burpham. Some of the documents of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries refer to "Teresworth". For example, the "Burgham Rentalls" of 1610 include a section headed "Burgham and Teresworth", while in a document dated 1 January 1787 there is a reference to "Teresworth within the Manor of Burgham". It is conceivable that this name was used for that part of the Manor which lay to the west of the River Wey.

The Manor of Burpham was bounded by the Manor of Worplesdon to the West, Sutton-by-Guildford to the North, and Stoke-by-Guildford to the South. The boundary between Worplesdon and Burpham ran across Whitmoor Heath, possibly roughly where the railway is now; at a much later date the Woking road was defined as the boundary. Burpham's eastern neighbour was West Clandon but we have treated the River Wey as limiting the area of our prime concern.

This was the way in which the county (as it became after William the Conqueror gave control of the old English shires to his Norman Counts) was organised by its temporal rulers. However the Church had a separate administrative structure, consisting of parishes. The whole of Surrey was in the Diocese of Winchester, within which the parish of St Mary's, Worplesdon embraced the two Manors of Worplesdon and of Burpham. In 1859 St Luke's Church, Burpham, was built as a Chapel-of-Ease to St Mary's.

In 1920 Burpham was removed from the parish of Worplesdon to form a new ecclesiastical parish together with Sutton Green. In 1927 Guildford became an independent Diocese. Jacobs Well was included in the parish of Burpham-with-Sutton until October 1960 when the village became part of the new Conventional District of St Peter's, Hazel Avenue. Meanwhile the Earl of Onslow, whose family had held the Manor of Burpham since 1720, sold it in 1905.

The Electoral Register seems to provide the simplest definition of today's village, covering as it does the "triangle" described above, but it also includes some outlying properties not yet covered by this study.