The village was in existence at the time of the
Norman invasion, as shown in the OpenDomesday on-line. In the 11th century it was known as
Hipton from the Old English words
heope and
-tun, meaning
Rose-hip settlement. Land in the area was held by
Count Alan of Brittany around 1086 and by
Richard de Camera. Various landowners over the next 150 years gave land to nearby St Mary's Abbey. After the dissolution, John Shipton had leased the manor which John Redman eventually bought from the Crown outright in 1557. By 1625 the manor had passed to
William Scudamore of Overton, who eventually sold it the
Bouchier family of nearby Beningbrough Hall and thence through succession to the
Dawnay family. In 1405 the
Battle of Shipton Moor was fought as part of an unsuccessful rebellion against the rule of
Henry IV. In 1655, Ann Middleton, a Yorkshire philanthropist and wife of the Sheriff of York, left £1,000 to build a grammar school in the village. She also left 20 shillings a year to the poor of Shipton. The grammar school stood until 1850, when the Lord of the Manor, the Hon. Payan Dawnay, knocked it down, and built a new one. Land to the north of the village was used as an airfield (
RAF Shipton) during the
First World War. In the
Second World War it was the base of a crashed aircraft recovery unit and then the site was used between 1953 and 1993 as a location for a government command and control bunker. On the west side of the village lies the now abandoned
Beningbrough railway station which opened in 1841 by the
Great North of England Railway on the now
East Coast Main Line first known as Shipton until 1898 it closed to passengers in 1958, and then to all traffic in 1965. ==Governance==