Today, Wrangle is one of eighteen parishes that, together with Boston town, form the Borough of Boston. Since the local government reorganization of 1 April 1974, Wrangle Parish has formed part of the Old Leake and Wrangle electoral ward.
The modern name of Wrangle reportedly comes from the Scandinavian Vrangr meaning bent or crooked—a reference to a stream long since gone. In 1089 the village appears under the name Werangle in the Domesday Book. In the 15th century it was known as Wranghill.
Historically, Wrangle was probably first settled in the iron age. It was certainly home to the 1st century Romans who also exploited the local coastline as a source of salt. Salt production also drew the land-hungry Saxons from the 5th century onwards, and they were very likely the first to systematically enclose and drain areas of the coastal salt marsh as a means of extending their agriculture. After the Norman invasion, the Domesday Book records parts of the village as being the possession of one of William the Conqueror's generals.
While there is as yet no coherent history of Wrangle thereafter, its fortunes can be guessed at from the following. In Medieval times it was both a locally important port and market centre. In the late 13th century, Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln, held a market every Saturday at his manor in Wrangle. The sheltered port, some 400 m to the West of the present church, relied on Hangel Creek and its access to the sea, then only 2.5 km (1.3 miles) away. A predecessor of the Angel pub stood on its banks. It was presumably from there that, in 1359, Wrangle furnished and sent one ship with eight men to help Edward III fight the Hundred Years war. In Elizabethan times Wrangle Manor was held by the Queen herself as part of her Richmond property. In 1676 it passed into the hands of a commoner, Thomas Woodcock. Its manorial rights were commuted in 1807.
The power of the church had meanwhile waxed and waned. The list of vicars of St Nicholas (later St Mary and St Nicholas) starts in 1342, the register in 1653. Controlled by Waltham Abbey until the latter's dissolution in 1540, the church passed under the reformation to the Diocese of Lincoln where it remains today. Many stained glass windows were demolished by the Puritans in the civil war. One was saved from Cromwell's men thanks to its timely burial in the then vicarage garden.
Today the Church of St Mary and St Nicholas is Wrangle's oldest building, with architecture from from Early English Gothic onwards. Reasons to visit include an Elizabethan/Jacobean pulpit, a tower with six bells and a magnificent 14th century east window. The second oldest is the nearby Old Vicarage, a Queen Anne period house, now a private home.
Wrangle's natural history (see link below for more detail) can be traced back to the iron age (600-100 BC) when a settlement on the site of Wrangle for its salt making. In Roman times, Wrangle was probably a small island in the then much larger Wash. Sea enclosure and land reclamation, initially to the West connecting the island to the mainland, and from Saxon times onwards out into The Wash led to today's village centre some 5 km (3.5 miles) inland from the sea. Coastal ecologists today distinguish four eras of enclosure for agricultural reclamation —in Saxon times, from medieval time up to 1700, from 1800 to 1900 and post-1950. There is also a significant area of 'non-reclaimed' saltmarsh and mudflats that are increasingly recognized as important intertidal habitats for bird life and invertebrate animals, also for the plant life that provides food for large numbers of wintering birds (see below).
Economic activity changed accordingly—from salt manufacture (up to the middle of the 17th century) to a prosperous wool trade and farming on reclaimed land, from fishing and thriving port services to a market centre, and from mixed farming to specialized production and distribution of vegetables, and most recently to organic farming.
