The village is built round a rectangle of streets, with the church in the south corner, and the green, with most of the older houses near it, on the northwest side.

With its heavy clay soil and poor drainage, Bledington seems to postdate nearby West Saxon manors situated on higher ground.

Bledington was still small and poor enough to be coupled with Sherbourne in 1303 as forming a knight's fee for the purpose of raising a feudal aid for the wedding of Edward I's daughter.

[7] The general picture, then, of the village is of a rather wide-spread group of rather small houses, with chimnenyless roofs, thatched and shaggy, often surrounded by mud, owing to the un-drained clay-based ground.

[8]The Black Death arrived in England in 1348 and manor court records suggest that at least one in three Bledington villagers died.

[8]: 50  The loss of income caused by the Black Death prompted the Abbot of Winchcombe to apply to the King, the Pope and the Bishop of Worcester for permission to appropriate the rectory in 1402, subordinating the resulting vicarage to the abbey and benefitting from the proceeds of the glebe and tithes.

[9] In 1546, following the Dissolution, the rectory, including farm, tithes and offerings, was granted to the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church, Oxford.

In March 1553, the manor was acquired from the Crown for £897.13s.1+1⁄2d (25 times its rental income) as part of an investment package by Thomas Leigh, a wealthy London merchant.

[12] At one stage the Leigh family owned the manors of Adlestrop, Maugersbury and Longborough, as well as their originating village of Stoneleigh.

[8]: 105 By 1600, Leigh's descendants had begun to sell parts of the estate, principally to its tenants, but these freeholds did not represent contiguous areas of land.

The arable land produced wheat, oats, and barley,[15] and by the late 19th century turnips and cider apples were also being grown.

By the mid-20th century, this industry had stopped owing to the cost of labour and lack of facilities for making cider locally, but the orchards were still a prominent feature of the landscape.

The church was lavishly rebuilt in the 15th century, though it retains earlier parts, and the 15th-century painted glass surviving in some of the windows is a notable feature.

A recess with a three-light window was built leading from the south-west corner of the chancel into an archway to the south aisle.

In 1548 Somerset, the Lord Protector, acting on behalf of the boy king Edward VI, ordered that all imagery should be removed from churches, and by 1650 St Leonards had lost its rood screen and window statues.

The tub-shaped font is 12th-century, the communion rails and altar table are 17th-century, and beside the 20th-century pulpit is an ancient wrought-iron hourglass stand.

The ecclesiastical parish includes both Bledington and the hamlet of Foscot in Oxfordshire and forms part of the Evenlode Vale benefice of the Anglican Church.

These include The Old Vicarage, erected c. 1845 and extended in 1865 and 1915, with stone dressings and a hipped slate roof,[17] as well as some groups of cottages, a few substantial houses on the road to Kingham, several barns, as well as the school and the former Methodist chapel.

The style now known as Bledington probably first entered the records with John Lainchbury, a farm labourer from Rissington who was the senior member of a set dancing in Idbury between 1850 and 1870.

Charles Benfield began playing the pipe and tabour for the Morris in the 1850s and 'inherited' the instruments from the renowned Sherborne and Northleach musician Jim 'the laddie' Simpson.

Benfield eventually went on to become a key character in the local Morris, playing for Milton, Idbury, Fifield and Longborough.

He ensured a link which touched almost four generations of dancers that enabled the dances to be recorded by Sharp and later demonstrated and refined by the Travelling Morrice, a group formed in Cambridge in the 1920s.

[26] The B4450, a secondary road linking Stow-on-the-Wold with Chipping Norton, runs through Bledington, near Kingham and through Churchill Village.

Through traffic usually uses the faster A436 between Stow-on-the-Wold with Chipping Norton, due to the shorter distance and a 5-minute saving in journey time.

The history of Bledington between the Norman Conquest and the beginning of the Great War is chronicled by M. K. Ashby in her book The Changing English Village.