Croydon
Situated near the source of the Wandle at the entrance to a beautiful valley that is shut in on the east by wooded hills, and on the west and south-west by breezy uplands, the prosperous modern town of Croydon occupies the site of a very ancient settlement that owned before the Conquest a church and a mill, as proved by the detailed description given of it in Doomsday Book. Now one of the largest and most important, though by no means the most picturesque of the Surrey suburbs of London, Croydon, the name of which is variously interpreted to mean the chalk hill, the crooked or winding valley, and the village of the cross, is associated from very early times with the history of the Church in England. Its manor, the value of which was assessed at the Conquest at sixteen hides and one virgate, was given by William I. to Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, to whose successors it long belonged, though the palace that in course of time replaced the ancient manor-house was deserted by them in the middle of the eighteenth century and was later altogether superseded by that at Addington already referred to.
Combining, as did most of the episcopal residences of mediæval times, the strength of a fortress and the latest refinements of domestic architecture, the palace of Croydon before its partial destruction must have been a kind of epitome of the various styles that succeeded each other between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, or, to quote the words of Archbishop Herring writing in 1754, 'an aggregate of buildings of different castes and ages.' Fortunately it still retains its three most distinctive features, the banqueting-hall, the guard-room, and the chapel, with some few relics of the many outbuildings for the use of its owner's retainers, and those of his guests, that once covered a vast area. In spite of all its manifest advantages, however, it was never a favourite residence of the archbishops, who, though many of them spent large sums upon it, are said to have complained constantly of its unhealthy situation. Henry VIII., too, often spoke of it in a disparaging way, and Lord Bacon once declared it to be 'a very obscure and dark place.'
Of the existing buildings the oldest is the guard-chamber, with a fine stone ribbed roof and a beautiful oriel window, a true gem of Gothic architecture. Built between 1396 and 1415 by Archbishop Arundel—who is chiefly remembered for his devotion to Henry Bolingbroke, at whose coronation as Henry IV. he officiated in 1399, and for his bitter hostility to the Lollards—the guard-chamber was the scene, in 1587, of the stately ceremony when Queen Elizabeth gave to Sir Christopher Hatton the seals of office of Lord Chancellor of England, that dignity having been refused by the then reigning Archbishop Whitgift, whose memory is held in high honour at Croydon as the founder of the famous hospital and other charities bearing his name.
Of somewhat later date than the guard-chamber, for it was built by Archbishop Stafford between 1443 and 1452, and restored in the seventeenth century by Archbishops Laud and Juxon, the great hall is still, in spite of much defacement, a noble structure, with a fine timber roof and a beautiful late Gothic porch. It is associated with many important historic memories, for in it, when in residence at Croydon, the archbishops held their court, receiving visits from the reigning sovereign and the great nobles and statesmen. It was there that Archbishop Cranmer, in 1553, condemned the heretic John Firth to the stake, at which he was himself to suffer three short years afterwards; there that Queen Mary, with Cardinal Reginald Pole as her adviser, presided over her first council after her beloved husband had left her and she had realised how hopeless was the task of winning his affections; and there her successor, Elizabeth, gave frequent audience to Archbishop Parker, whom she had made primate soon after her accession, and whom she sorely embarrassed by expecting him to give her and her whole court hospitality for several days at a time. In the great hall at Croydon, too, the virgin queen received the French ambassador after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, taking his breath away by introducing him to his fellow-guests as the man who had plotted to bring about her own death; and it was there, perhaps, that the doomed Archbishop Laud penned much of the journal that reveals the secret springs of his severely criticised actions.
To Croydon, after the see of Canterbury had been vacant for fifteen years, came the newly appointed Archbishop William Juxon, the faithful friend who had ministered to Charles I. to the bitter end, in spite of the contempt the ill-fated monarch had shown for his wise counsels; and later the palace was tenanted for a few weeks at a time by Archbishop Sheldon, builder of the theatre named after him at Oxford, and by his successors: Sancroft, suspended in 1689 for his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary; Tillotson, the famous preacher who attended Lord Russell on the scaffold; Tenison, Herring, Hutton, and Dr. Cornwallis; none of whom, except Archbishop Herring, who wrote of it in loving terms, showed any affection for their Surrey home.
The chapel of Croydon Palace, built under Archbishops Laud and Juxon between 1633 and 1663, occupies the site of a much earlier place of worship that is often referred to in ecclesiastical records. No trace of it, however, remains, and its successor has suffered much in the various vicissitudes through which it has passed. It was divided from the see of Canterbury in 1780, and secularised in 1807, after which it served for some time as an armoury for the local militia, and was put to other even less dignified usages. In 1887 it was bought, with the banqueting-hall, by the Duke of Newcastle, who presented both to the sisters of the Church Extension Society, and it is now an orphanage under the care of the Kilburn sisters.
The Saxon church of Croydon, or Croidene, as it was then spelt, referred to in the Doomsday Survey—whose priest, Ælffic by name, was one of the witnesses to a will still extant dated 960—probably rose, as did its Norman successor, from an islet in the midst of the head-waters of the Wandle, which united to form that tributary of the Thames in what was known as My Lord's or Laud's Pond in the palace grounds. Near to this church were a great water-mill and a huge dam, but this was not the mill of Doomsday Book, all trace of which is lost. The huts of the original settlement, of which a few interesting relics were discovered when the excavations were made for the railway, probably extended from the church in the direction of Beddington, but those that formed the nucleus of the new town, and were chiefly occupied by charcoal-burners, were grouped near the church on the Haling side. Until the completion in 1850 of the admirable modern system of drainage, the whole of the now healthy district of Croydon was frequently flooded, and for several centuries the inundations were looked upon as supernatural visitations that could not be averted, but were tokens of impending evil or good fortune. References to this strange belief are of frequent occurrence in the contemporary press, the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey, to quote but one case in point, writing: 'Between this place (Caterham) and Coulsdon ... issues out sometimes a bourne which overflows and runs down to Croydon. This is held by the inhabitants to be ominous, and prognosticating something remarkable approaching, as it did before the happy restoration of Charles II. in 1660; also before the Plague of London in 1665.'