CHAPTER III 

 FULHAM PALACE 



FULHAM PALACE is the well-known summer residence of 

 the Bishops of London. 



It is said to be thirteen hundred years since the bishops 

 first established themselves on the banks of the Thames at Fulham, 

 and assuming this to be correct, they must have settled there soon 

 after A.D. 597, the date of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to 

 Christianity. 



According to some authorities the word Fulham, or Fullerham, 

 means the " place " either " of fowls " or " of dirt," but we ask 

 in vain for the why, or the wherefore, of this. Somewhere, no 

 doubt, lost in the mists of centuries, there lies hidden some tradition 

 or historical fact which would explain it but most of the events 

 of that early period are shrouded in an obscurity which it is im- 

 possible to penetrate, and the false and the true are inextricably 

 mixed up together. 



The " Manor House " of Fulham, as it was called until com- 

 paratively recent times, is almost as badly off for historians as 

 Lambeth, the chequered story of which was sketched in the last 

 chapter. Therefore I base my account of it mainly on the 

 testimony of Thomas Faulkner, who wrote of the Parish of Fulham 

 In 1813, and of Ly sons, whose " Environs of London " was published 

 rather earlier. These two writers have left us the best history 

 extant of the episcopal Palace, and of the lives of its learned 

 occupants. 



The gardens of the Manor House are far more beautiful and 

 famous than those of the Primate, and have been so from the days 



62 



