Harringay Manor of the Bishop of London

Description

Thompson includes this in his list of residential manor houses of the Bishop of London.

There is no evidence of a manor-house but there was a lodge in the park, which may have been at Lodge Hill on the boundary with Finchley, where a moat or ditch was visible in 1797. It was mentioned in 1441 and 1464 and overgrown with trees by 1576, but remains survived in 1593. Seven episcopal visits to Hornsey are recorded between 1306 and 1335: bishops may have used the house which was acquired in 1293 from Thomas of Banbury and Joan his wife by Richard de Gravesend, bishop 1280-1307, and which descended to his brother Stephen, bishop 1318-38. There was no episcopal residence at Hornsey in 1539 or 1579, when John Aylmer, bishop 1577-94, had the lease of a copyhold house in Hornsey manor, which he had repaired and sometimes visited. (VCH Vol. 6)

Norden, in his Speculum Britannica, 1593, states that a hill or fort in Hornesey Park, and so called Lodge Hill, for that thereon for some time stood a lodge, when the park was replenished with deare; but it seemeth by the foundation it was rather a castle than a lodge, for the hill is at this time trenched with two deep ditches, now olde and overgrown with bushes. This lodge, which was the property of the See of London from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, occupied a site to the south-west of the Manor Farm house on the north-east of Bishop's Wood, between Highgate and Finchley. Although it appears that the lodge was pulled down in the fourteenth century on account of its great age, traces of the moat are visible, from which it would seem that it was square in plan with sides 210 ft. in length. The moat was fed by a spring which still flows. (VCH Vol. 2)