The reason for this oblivion is not far to seek. The palace was deserted; it was pulled down before 1607—Camden says that even then there was not a stone remaining—there was not a single house within half a mile in every direction. There was no one, when the last stones had been carted away, left to remember or to remind his children that there had been a palace on this spot. Another house was built here, but no tradition attached to it. Two hundred years passed, and then came the destruction of the second house; in 1745 there was not even a cottage near the spot. This being so, it is not difficult to understand why the site was forgotten.
THE LONG BARN
The moat remained, however, and apparently some of the substructures; a building of stone and thatch, part of the offices of the palace, also stood. They called it the 'Long Barn,' and when the distressed Protestants were brought over here in 1700 as many as the place would hold were crammed into the Long Barn. Market gardens lay all over the country between Kennington Road and Lambeth, and on the site of the palace there was not a single person left who could carry on the tradition of the king's house that once stood here. Roque, the map-maker of 1745, knew nothing about it. In 1795 the Long Barn was taken down. At the beginning of the century houses began to rise here and there; streets began to be formed: at least three streets cross the gardens and the site of the palace; but there is not one tradition of a place which, as we shall see, was full of history for six hundred years. 'Is this fame?' might ask the king who crowned himself here, the king who died here, the king who was brought up here, the kings who kept their Christmas feast here, the kings who here received their brides, held Parliament, and went out a-hunting.
The king who crowned himself here was Harold Harefoot, son of Cnut—that is to say, it was at 'Lambeth,' and there was no other house at Lambeth.
SKETCH MAP
The king who died in this house was that young Dane who appears to have been an incarnation of the ideal Danish brutality. He dragged his brother's body out of its grave and flung it into the Thames; he massacred the people of Worcester and ravaged the shire; and he did these brave deeds and many others all in two short years. Then he went to his own place. His departure was both fitting and dramatic. For one so young it showed with what a yearning and madness he had been drinking. He went across the river—there was, I repeat, no other house in Lambeth except this, so that it must have been here—to attend the wedding of his standard-bearer, Tostig the Proud, with Goda, daughter of the Thane Osgod Clapa, whose name survives in his former estate of Clapham. A Danish wedding was always an occasion for hard drinking, while the minstrels played and sang and the mummers tumbled. When men were well drunken the pleasing sport of bone throwing began: they threw the beef bones at each other. The fun of the game consisted in the accident of a man not being able to dodge the bone which struck him, and probably killed him. Archbishop Alphege was thus killed. The soldiers had no special desire to kill the old man: why couldn't he enter into the spirit of the game and dodge the bones? As he did not, of course he was hit, and as the bone was a big and a heavy bone, hurled by a powerful hand, of course it split open his skull. One may be permitted to think that perhaps King Hardacnut, who is said to have fallen down suddenly when he 'stood up to drink,' did actually intercept a big beef bone which knocked him down; and as he remained comatose until he died, the proud Tostig, unwilling to have it said that even in sport his king had been killed at his wedding, gave out that the king fell down in a fit. This, however, is speculation.