Place Name
Originally plain High Street. Barnes means the place by the barn or barns from the Old English word bere-ærn, which translates as barley house. It was first mentioned as the singular Berne in AD939, at around the time that King Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, gave the manor to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral (although David Mills in A Dictionary of London Place Names says that this is from a “spurious charter”). However, what ever the case, it was spelt that way by the time it was featured in the Domesday Book of 1086. By 1244 it was spelt La Berne and, as the area grew, it became the plural as in Bernes in 1222 and Barnes in 1387.
