Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Saw this recently 

https://londonist.com/2014/01/anglo-saxon-london-map-updated

and have been trying to work out where we are.  Some places are obvious like neasden and webely etc...

But alas no Anglo Saxon name for Haringey lol

Tags for Forum Posts: historic, london, map

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Somewhere between Haering and Tota is my guess,?  Cool map

You're quite wrong, Sticky Beak. Our Saxon roots are very much on the map

Back in 2004, the information about Harringay's Saxon roots was hard to find. Since then I've been posting it on the web in all sorts of places, including on this site and in one of My Wikipedia articles. 

Probably the most accessible is my toponymy on Wikipedia- all thoroughly researched and referenced. 

Harringay and Hornsey are both derived from Hareing's Hege (Haerings enclosure). We're pretty much where Haering is on the Londonist's map, perhaps a smidgen to the east. 

They first published this back in 2011. I guess they have updated parts of it. 

Took the liberty of playing with this - the red arrow indicates Haeras which I am guessing may be Harringay. N-E of it is Totas - Tottenham? 

"Haeras"? You mean Haering? And, yes, of course Haering is the site of Harringay. See my last response.

That's weird. When I put the arrow on I could have sworn it said Haeras - a bit like Totas to the north-east. Of course I was still in the area when the naming of the new borough ws controversial. I seem to recall a learned professor spoke at a meeting about Haering being the original A-S name. He won the day. And the spelling was a compromise as so many did NOT want Harringay used. He obligingly sourced an alternative. So now it is the borough so good they named it twice.

So I guess the old Harringay house, was the site of the Saxon Manor house.

Bruce Castle, was the site of the other, main,  Saxon manor house, in the borough.

No, there’s absolutely no evidence for the site of Harringay House being in any sort of use before Harringay House. The land on which is stands is part of Fernfields Manor. The available evidence suggests that the house that became Harringay Farm was a medieval Manor House, probably for Fernfields. It stood near the junction of Ferme Park Road (notice the lexical link to Fernfields) and Tottenham Lane, opposite the now demolished but previously much photographed Manor Cottages. 

There might not be physical evidence.  But normally big houses are build on the foundations of older houses.  Esp when it comes to important manor houses.

/With the manor being mentioned in the Doomsday book.  Then if there was indeed a manor house there, at that time.  Then it was clearly a Saxon one, before.

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol6/pp140-146

Harringay alias Hornsey was mentioned in the Domesday book. but the manor house, if there was any, was over in Highgate.

As I said in my last comment, the sub-manor relating to what we call the Harringay Ladder today, was Fernfields Manor. I suspect that its manor was what became Harringay Farm.

By the Georgian period, there were more merchants' mansions being built in the countryside around London than there were old sites to build on. So your suggested rule of thumb doesn't work, I'm afraid.

A couple of fanciful Victorian authors are responsible for musing about a former building on the site of Harringay House. In 1904, in his Story of Hornsey, R.O. Sherrington claimed that there was a tudor mansion on the site. He cited William Keane's 1850 The Beauties of Middlesex, being a particular Description of the principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry in the County of Middlesex, as the source for this claim. However, when I checked Keane's book, I discovered that Keane only mentions a Norman castle on the site. Keane offers no evidence for this, I suspect because there is none. Sherrington was either very cavalier in transforming the imagined Norman castle into an imagined Tudor mansion, or he opted for the Tudor fancy because he thought it was more believable:  I mean, you might lose a Tudor mansion but you'd hardly misplace a Norman Castle! 

Sorry, Colin, wish as you may, but there is simply no evidence for there ever having been a house on the site before Harringay House. I did the research for this twelve years ago when writing the first ever history of Harringay which I published on Wikipedia as a series of articles. I looked for evidence and there is none.  With evidence aplenty of other former manor houses in Hornsey and Tottenham, I've concluded that the lack of evidence is almost certainly because there was never any house on the site before Harringay House.

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