Clarendon Palace

Clarendon Forest saw regular use in the Roman period — a Roman road linking to the Iron Age hillfort at Old Sarum passed about two miles to the north, and archaeological finds suggest the area was fairly densely populated. It was probably already a royal hunting ground by the late Saxon period, and is documented as sometimes used as a military mustering-place from 1070 onwards. The name Clarendon itself is first recorded only in 1164, and probably derives from an Old English form, *Claringa dūn — "hill associated with Clare" — after a man named Clare who appears as a witness in a charter from the reign of King Eadred.

The Norman kings visited it too, and the park was probably formally laid out with deer leaps in the early 12th century under Henry I, its lawns, coppices, meadows and wood-pasture set within defined boundaries. A hunting lodge stood within it by 1130.

Henry II and Henry III both invested heavily in the property, turning the hunting lodge into a royal residence and palace. In 1164 Henry II drew up the Constitutions of Clarendon here, an attempt to curb ecclesiastical privilege and limit papal authority in England; a memorial raised on the site in 1844 declared that "the spirit awakened within these walls ceased not until it had vindicated the authority of the laws and accomplished the Reformation of the Church of England."

The main building campaign came in the early-to-mid 13th century, adding the King's Chapel and the Antioch chamber under the supervision of Elias of Dereham, the administrator who also oversaw the building of Salisbury Cathedral. At its height the palace comprised several buildings around a central courtyard inside a small wall, laid out as a rectangle roughly 240 by 80 metres — over five acres — with terraced gardens.

Archaeological investigation has recovered a detailed picture of Queen Eleanor of Provence's quarters after a major enlargement and refurbishment in the early 1250s. By 1252 she had a compact suite — a hall, a chapel, three chambers and a wardrobe — spread over two floors, with a new two-storey building giving access to "a fair privy chamber, well vaulted on both floors." Her hall's fireplace carried double marble columns and an overmantel carved with the twelve months of the year, and its windows, glazed partly in plain and grisaille glass and partly in figured colour, overlooked a garden.

The chapel, on the upper floor, had a marble altar flanked by opening windows and a crucifix with figures of Mary and John above it; its walls, first painted with scenes from the life of St Katharine, were later redecorated. One of the queen's chambers held a window depicting the Virgin and Child with a kneeling earthly queen, presumed to be Eleanor herself. The rooms were laid with patterned and figured tiled floors glowing in gold, grey and pink; a surviving section of the pavement, laid in 1250–52, is now in the British Museum's medieval ceramics room.

It was at Clarendon in 1453 that Henry VI first showed signs of insanity. Use of the palace declined afterwards: by 1500 the buildings were no longer maintained, and by 1574 the site was described as no more than a simple hunting lodge. Elizabeth I visited that year, but found the buildings in such poor condition that she had to dine in a temporary "banquett house."

The execution of Charles I in 1649 brought the palace's confiscation by Parliament. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 the park passed briefly to George Monck, then in 1664 to Edward Hyde — who had already taken the title Earl of Clarendon in 1661, apparently in anticipation of acquiring the estate. A new mansion, Clarendon Park, was built in classical style elsewhere in the park in the early 18th century, and the abandoned palace deteriorated into what Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in 1963, called "a tragedy": he found only "one crag of walling" still standing amid elder and wild clematis, marked by a single old Ministry of Works sign.

The site was excavated across several campaigns between 1933 and 1939 by the Finnish art historian Tancred Borenius, with further digs in 1957, 1964, 1965, and through the 1970s and 1980s; a tile-kiln uncovered there has been reconstructed and is now held by the British Museum. Above ground today, only the end wall of the Great Hall still stands, and the site — now within the grounds of Clarendon Park — is a scheduled monument and, since 1960, a Grade II listed building.