Month: July 2021

Here from the twelfth century up to the Reformation stood the priory of St Trinity-in-the-Wood, founded in about 1145. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries,…

The present mansion of Knebworth House replaced an older house begun in the last decade of the fifteenth century, its mainly Elizabethan fabric dated over…

‘Old Keeper Mayling’, who died a very old man, sixty years before Vicars Bell published Little Gaddesden (1949), was a lively raconteur who used to…

A number of ghosts have appeared at Hitchin, including the Ancient Greek poet Homer, who, according to the poet George Chapman (c.1559–1634), appeared to him…

Hatfield House, home of the Cecils, used to be haunted by a family ghost, James, sixth Earl of Salisbury. It was his mother’s fault, as…

In 1751, John Butterfield, publican of the Black Horse at Gubblecote, managed to rouse a mob against an old woman named Ruth Osborne, of Long…

Sissavernes, earlier Sissavens, Farm at Codicote probably gets its name from a historical lord of the manor, William de Sisvierne, mentioned in 1166. In the…

David Hughson (Dr David Pugh) writes in his Walks through London … with the Surrounding Suburbs (1817): Passing on to Cheshunt: here is a plain…

The great mansion of Cassiobury, demolished in 1927, was the home of the Earls of Essex for over 250 years and was said to be…

The children of Aldbury once lived in fear of the bogeyman Simon Harcourt. A barrister of the Inner Temple and lord of Pendley Manor (1694–1724),…