{"id":6011,"date":"2020-06-04T17:12:36","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T16:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/?page_id=6011"},"modified":"2021-02-07T13:44:40","modified_gmt":"2021-02-07T13:44:40","slug":"two-incorrect-myths-concerning-richmond-park","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/history-of-richmond\/richmond-park\/two-incorrect-myths-concerning-richmond-park\/","title":{"rendered":"Two incorrect myths concerning Richmond Park"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article, by John Cloake<\/strong>, who was the Society’s founder and later its President, was first published in 2014 in the Society’s journal, Richmond History<\/em>, no. 35, which is now out of print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSheene Chase\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 50 years of research into the history of Richmond, I\nhave never come across any evidence to corroborate the story that the area\nenclosed by Charles I in the present Richmond Park in 1635-37 had once been a\nroyal hunting ground called \u201cSheene Chase\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As far as I can trace, the story seems to have originated\nin Beresford Chancellor’s first book Historical Richmond<\/em>, published by\nGeorge Bell in London and by Hiscoke and Son in Richmond in 1885. I have found\nno mention of it in any earlier publication. In Chancellor’s words, repeated\nalmost exactly in his later and weightier History and Antiquities of\nRichmond, Kew, Petersham, Ham, etc.<\/em> published by Hiscokes’ in 1894:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c….before his [Charles I’s] accession to the throne it\nwas but a wild common of waste land which was known as Sheene Chase, and which\ncomprised much of the surrounding property, not now included in the Park\nbounds; it must however have been looked upon as a Park in Henry VIII\u2019s reign\nfor in 1528 when the King was at Greenwich the French Ambassador was lodged at\nRichmond, and it was arranged that he and his suite should hunt “\u2019in every\none of the King’s Parks there\u2019”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, as he stated in his preface to Historical Richmond<\/em>,\nChancellor was under 17 years of age when he was writing it. He was not allowed\naccess to the printed books in the British Museum, but was permitted to examine\nsome of the manuscripts! He claimed however to have consulted also \u201crare books\nat the British Museum, the Bodleian and other Public Libraries\u201d. His conclusion\nfrom the 1528 reference to parks in the plural was evidently reached in\ncomplete ignorance of the fact that, in addition to the park adjacent to\nRichmond Palace, Henry VII had created another \u201cRichmond Park\u201d on the Middlesex\nbank of the river, immediately opposite the Palace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSheene Chase\u201d seems most likely to have been a misreading\nof some manuscript entry, but Chancellor never recorded his source. I may be\ndoing the 16-year-old an injustice, but how skilled was his palaeography? Was\nhe really able to decipher accurately a document in the script of the early\n16th century? I have never come across the name Sheene Chase in any context\nother than Chancellor’s, let alone used in relation to ground on the Hill where\nRichmond Park is today. I have traced the previous ownership of every piece of\nland enclosed in the Park (see Palaces and Parks of Richmond and Kew<\/em>,\nVoll, appendix 8, pp 240\u2013254) and it is apparent that, apart from privately\nowned closes (which were bought from their owners), parts of the common fields\nof Mortlake and Kingston, and four relatively small tracts actually in the\nKing’s own hands, the rest was entirely commons (those of Richmond, Petersham\nand Ham being royal lands, as the manors were royal manors but subject to the\ntime-honoured commoning rights of the manorial tenants, so by no means at the\nKing’s disposal at will). The lands actually held by the King in the 1630s were\nparts of the demesne land of Petersham manor (The Warren and Berry Grove) and\nsmall remnants of the erstwhile sub-manor of Hartleton (by then subsumed in\nHam) – Lord’s Cop and Chalar’s Grove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suspect that if the name \u201cSheene Chase\u201d was actually\nfound in some document by Chancellor, it may have been a tract of land\nsomewhere else in the kingdom that had been in the ownership of the Charterhouse\nof Shene. Raymond Grant’s book The Royal Forests of England<\/em> (Alan\nSutton, 1991) points out on p 30 that \u201ca chase was usually a district where the\nright of hunting the deer belonged to a subject\u201d. (Forests, warrens and hays\nwere all royal land.) Apparently there were only 13 chases recorded in England\n(none of them Sheene), of which five were back in royal hands and so sold off\nby the Commonwealth in the 1650s, while the rest were leased out. (See S.J.\nMadge, The Domesday of Crown Lands<\/em>, Frank Cass & Co,1968, p27.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKing Henry VIII’s Mound\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for King Henry VIII\u2019s Mound, there is no evidence to\nconnect it to that king (or his father). It is first noted in the maps showing\nthe lands to be enclosed in the Park drawn by Nicholas Lane and Elias Allen in\nthe 1630s, with the name ‘The King’s Standing’. The names of landowners given\non Lane’s map show that it must have been drawn before April 1632 (and not in\n1637 as has generally been assumed \u2013 Lane himself noted that \u201cThis plott,\nhaving been made certain years before the erection of His Majesty’s New Park\nwall\u2026\u201d So the name The King’s Standing dated from before 1632.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mound was of course a Neolithic burial barrow (of which\nthere are several others to be seen in the Park along the edge of the\nescarpment between Richmond and Ham), but it makes sense that Charles I might\nhave stood there to shoot small game in the adjacent Berry Ground, which\nappears to have been an extension of Petersham Warren, or perhaps to survey the\nlands he had in mind to enclose, or even just to admire the views of the Thames\nand of distant London. Then in 1686 the mound was called \u201cKing Henry’s Mount\u201d and\nin 1698 it became King Henry VII’s (for no ascertainable reason). Its first\nappearance as \u201cHenry the 8th Mount\u201d was on the plan drawn by Edward John Eyre\nin 1754. Whether this was just because of a misreading of the previous name or\nwhether it may reflect the origin of the later story it is difficult to tell.\nThough I have found no printed version of this story before that in Agnes\nStrickland’s Lives of the Queens of England<\/em> (1840\u201348), it was clearly\ncurrent earlier. In 1835 Edward Jesse, Deputy Surveyor of the Royal Parks,\nwrote: \u201cThis mound has long been celebrated as the spot on which Henry the\nEighth stood to watch the going up of a rocket to assure him that the death of\nAnne Boleyn would enable him to marry Lady Jane Seymour….\u201d Agnes Strickland’s\nhighly colourful version was quoted on p 47 of Pamela Fletcher-Jones’s Richmond\nPark: Portrait of a Royal Playground<\/em> (Phillimore 1972). It appears to have\nbeen Folkestone Williams in his Domestic Memoirs of the Royal Family<\/em>\n(Hurst & Blackett, 1860) who first demolished the story by pointing out\nthat Henry was at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire on the evening of the day of Anne’s\nexecution, too far away to have been reached from Richmond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is its correct name? It seems to have drifted from\nMount to Mound relatively recently. After passing briefly through the hands of\nHenry VII, it remained [King] Henry VIII\u2019s Mount in all official documents up\nto at least the 1860s. However the Ordnance Survey map of 1913 named it as King\nHenry VIII Mound, and this name seems to have been followed by Collenette in\n1937 and by all those who have written about it since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article, by John Cloake, who was the Society’s founder and later its President, was first published in 2014 in the Society’s journal, Richmond History, no. 35, which is now out of print. \u201cSheene Chase\u201d In 50 years of research into the history of Richmond, I have never come across any evidence to corroborate the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":6016,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6011","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6011"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6014,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6011\/revisions\/6014"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}