CHAPTER III 
FULHAM PALACE 
ULHAM 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 4.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. y 
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 Lysons, 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 
