Place Name
Directional. Before the palace there was simply Hampton, recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086 as Hammtone, meaning farmland in a river bend, a good 400 years before Hampton Court was built. Hampton Courte was first mentioned in 1476 but it was not the splendid Tudor mansion that still stands today. Rather it was a medieval manor house that Thomas Wolsey had knocked down to make way for a grand new palace. Henry VIII, no stranger to property theft, was certainly impressed enough to have it for his own when Wolsey fell from favour after failing to secure the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.
