Qualla: Fulham Palace

Fulham Palace: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0. For something like 1,250 years, the same job description applied to whoever owned this riverside estate in west London: Bishop of London. From sometime in the 8th century until 1973, the bishops took possession of the Manor of Fulham as lords of the manor in unbroken succession, generation after generation, replacing the buildings, replanting the gardens, importing exotic trees from the Americas, surviving Henry VI's lavish visits, a German V1 flying bomb, and twelve centuries of England's weather. The current Tudor red-brick palace is the result. So is the moat that nobody knew was Britain's largest until they started excavating in the 1970s, and so is the holm oak that is now five hundred years old.

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Image: Tilman2007 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fulham Palace: Older Than the Church

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before any bishop arrived, this riverside meadow was an isolated eyot in the braided channels of the Thames. Archaeologists working since the early 1970s have found struck flint from the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic ages, evidence of a Bronze Age barrow, and traces of...

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Image: Tilman2007 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fulham Palace: Bishop Hill's Trees

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of the surviving palace is Tudor. Dendrochronological analysis of the timbers in the Great Hall roof shows that the oak was felled in the spring of 1493, and the gate to the Tudor courtyard contains timber felled in the spring of 1495. The two-year gap fits a major building ...

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Image: Tilman2007 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fulham Palace: The Bishop Who Grew Coffee

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hopefully Acceptable Username, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bishop Henry Compton, who held London from 1675 to 1713, was the kind of cleric who would today be called a horticultural pioneer. He used the gardens at Fulham as a laboratory for the new world's botany. He introduced the American magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) and Liriodendron ...

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Image: Hopefully Acceptable Username | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fulham Palace: The Moat Underneath

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fulham Palace was once surrounded by the largest domestic moated site in medieval England. The first known reference to it appears in a 1392 document as magna fossa, the great ditch, but it is thought to be much older, possibly Danish in origin and possibly built as flood defence...

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Image: Tilman2007 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fulham Palace: The Plymouth Manuscript

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edwardx, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a quieter story about Fulham involving a single object. The lost manuscript of Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford's first-hand account of the Mayflower voyage and the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1620, somehow ended up in the Bishop of London's library at Ful...

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Image: Edwardx | CC BY-SA 3.0