Place Name
Humphrey Henchman (1592 – 1675) was the Bishop of London from 1663 until his death, his tenure seeing both the Great Plague and the Fire of London. During the English Civil War he paid for his royalist sympathies by being ejected as a canon of Salisbury Cathedral, where he had been since 1623. After joining the Royalist army, he had his estates confiscated. In some senses he lived up to his name, helping the future Charles II to escape the country after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 (however, the term is much older meaning a horse groom). Henchman, eventually had the last laugh, after the Restoration of 1660, he was made Bishop of Salisbury and, in 1663, Bishop of London. This is one of a small number of Edwardian streets built in 1911 that are named after bishops of London, who were lords of the manor of Fulham. Their former summer house, Fulham Palace, is a few miles away and Wormholt, as the area was referred to, was considered the waste ground of the manor and used for “depasturing cattle and swine of copyhold tenants”.
