There are a number of Bronze Age round barrows on or close to the lip of Mendip's northern scarp above Ubley, but
contra earlier edits of this page, no Neolithic long barrows are yet known on the high ground to the south of the village. In a charter of
King Edgar, between 959 and 975 the name of the village was recorded as
Hubbanlege. The text of the charter itself does not survive; all we know of it is from its appearance in an index list of purported grants to Glastonbury Abbey compiled probably in the mid-13th century. The charter is S1771 in Peter Sawyer's standard handlist of Anglo-Saxon charters up to 1066. Ubley was listed in the
Domesday Book of 1086 as
Tumbeli, which is clearly a garbled expression of the (probably) original Old English toponym. It seems fairly certain that the second element is Old English
lēah, 'a woodland clearing', but with an important secondary, or even sometimes alternative meaning of 'wood pasture', which seems to have been a development from the primary meaning. The meaning of the first element is entirely unknown, but seems most likely to represent a personal name, perhaps
Ubba. There is no evidence whatsoever, of any kind whether archaeological or historical, for the frequent but completely unfounded story that Ubley is the VEB which is found cast into a number of pigs of lead from the Roman lead workings at Charterhouse on Mendip. There is no authoritative agreement on what these letters actually signify although the late Professor Todd was of the view that it probably
is a place-name and is most likely to refer to the mining settlement at Charterhouse itself, although this question is now probably far beyond firm proof. Prof Todd has also produced a very useful list of Roman lead pigs identified from the Mendip mines up to the date of his publication. The parish was part of the
hundred of
Chewton. Mining for
ochre and
manganese took place during the 19th century. ==Governance==