There is a legend that once in Bratonizh lived a wealthy peasant who had four sons: Mitrofan, Stepan, Fedot, Khariton, and a daughter, Nadezhda. He gifted each of them a village, naming them after his children. Thus, the villages of Mitrofanikha, Stepanovo, Fedotovo, Kharitonovo emerged, which still exist today, while the village of Nadino was located near Kharitonovo. The village by the lake was left common, named Bratomezh, but later the letter 'm' was replaced with 'n'.

Bratonizh is first mentioned in the 13th century. When the Mongol-Tatar army was moving along the Klyazma River towards Vladimir, after the battle with Yevpaty Kolovrat, they devastated Osovets and neighboring Bratonizh. After this event, the name of the village disappeared from sources for many years. Only in the land survey book of 1797 is it mentioned: 'The village of Bratonizh is located by the Bratonizh Lake, from which a stream flows, joining another, forming the Mytna River. The peasants have no crafts, they live on rent. The village belongs to the lady sub-lieutenant Maria Petrovna Grigoryeva. It has 5 peasant households and 27 inhabitants: 15 men and 12 women.'

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the village was part of the Kopninskaya volost of the Pokrovsky district, and since 1926, it has been part of the Boldinskaya volost of the Vladimir district. In 1926, Bratonizh had 42 peasant households. History is silent on whether there was a chapel in the village before 1917. Only in the early 2000s did local residents decide to build a chapel in honor of Saint John the Sochi Martyr, who lived in the 14th century in Trebizond and was engaged in trade. Soon, a small chapel dedicated to this saint, the patron of trade, appeared next to the monument to those who died in the Great Patriotic War. It is a wooden one-domed chapel, a square under a steep gable roof, with a porch on two pillars topped with a small bell tower.