Place Name
This was, in the Middle Ages, once part of the Great North Road. Friern comes from the Middle English word freren meaning of the brothers and is a reference to the former landowners, the Brotherhood or Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem who cared for pilgrims and the sick during the Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries. The Friern Barnet & District Local History Society explains: “In 1199 the Knights were given an estate, approximately where Friary Park is now, and it is possible that they built a hospice near where St James Church now stands. At this time the main road to the north ran from Muswell Hill down Colney Hatch Lane (then called Halwykstrete) and along Friern Barnet Lane (Wolkstrete) so a hospice would have provided comfort to travellers. In 1540 the land passed back to the Crown and then to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s.” The addition of Freren distinguished this from the other manors of Barnet, Chipping Barnet and East Barnet (the term barnet was a reference to the fact that Middlesex and Hertfordshire once covered by a great wood was cleared by burning sometime around the 11thCentury hence the burnt place). The name Friern Barnet was first recorded in the 13thCentury as Ferennebarnethe and Frerenbarnet both in 1274. Two decades later it was written as Frerenebarnet and in 1336 as Freresbarnet. It became Friern Barnet in 1535, with the name sticking even after Queen Elizabeth I gave the former manor house, the name of which had changed to Friary House in the 16thCentury, to Sir Walter Raleigh.
