The village in the valley' – ‘dael wisc’ - is at least one, and to me the most probable, of the suggested derivations of the name Dulwich.  Perhaps it was 'the valley where the dill grew', although the only support for this suggestion, in the absence of any mention of this white- flowering herb in any of the records, is indirect, in that one of the manor's old fields was called Blanchdown.  Less likely are 'Dul's Creek' or 'Dyla's Swamp', the former because (contrary to what anyone will tell you about the river Effra) nothing remotely resembling a river has ever flowed through Dulwich, the latter because the area is too far above sea-level and too well drained ever to have been swamp or marshland, certainly since pre-historic times, and both because there is no other evidence whatsoever for the existence of either of these two supposedly eponymous Anglo-Saxons.

No, a cursory glance at a contour map tells one that the village in the valley is a perfect description of Dulwich, sloping gently as it does from the line of hills between Crystal Palace and Horniman Gardens on the south and east, towards Brockwell Park on the west, and with other hills (notably the ridge of high ground between Herne Hill and Denmark Hill on the north-west) marking its extremities.  Between these borders lie about 1,450 acres of what was once (and not very long ago) a more or less centralised collection of dwellings, surrounded by fields of arable and pasture, while to the south of the village itself lay the common land and the great North Wood from which Norwood takes its name.  The woods have now virtually lost their separate identity, although there is still no shortage of trees in Dulwich, and many of the fields have never been built on, but remain as open spaces and playing fields.  As for the rest, however, much has been sacrificed in the cause of urban development, but in contrast to the decay of other parts of London Dulwich has somehow managed to retain much of its old rural charm.

That this is so is in no small measure attributable to the accidental fact of history that, in the first thousand years of its recorded existence, Dulwich was the carefully-guarded domain of but six institutions, families, or individuals.  Even the sale of most of the freeholds to owner-occupiers under the provisions of the Leasehold Reform Acts of 1967 and 1993 should not, in theory, alter this state of affairs, as the Estates Governors, operating the Scheme of Management sanctioned by that Act, still enjoy the right to control much of the development, and preserve the amenities, of the area.

We may trace the history of the manor of Dulwich from its beginnings as a community to its development into one of London's populous suburbs.  In using the word 'manor', I should add some qualification.  A manor, as the term was somewhat vaguely understood in the Middle Ages, comprised any area of land held by one feudal tenant, usually of the Crown.  It could vary in size from a few hundred acres or less, to several thousand acres, and could comprise only part of one village, or a collection of several villages.  In other words, 'the village' and 'the manor' had separate meanings which did not necessarily coincide, so that when we speak of 'the manor of Dulwich' we must for example exclude the area bounded by Herne Hill, Danecroft Road, Half Moon Lane and Ruskin Walk, which (perhaps surprisingly in view of its proximity to the centre of the village) has never been held by the Estates Governors or by any of their predecessors in title.  Similarly, the phrase may apply to a slightly different area at different times, as the existing Lord of the Manor acquired or disposed of properties, and for this reason I shall not be dealing with the early history of the Knight's Hill estate in West Dulwich, although this has now formed part of the Dulwich Estate for over a century, since it was never part of the medieval manor.

The continuity of ownership to which I have referred has had one by-product of enormous value to the historical researcher, in that the tendency has been for Dulwich’s numerous historical records, particularly those relating to property, to be kept together in one repository.  When Edward Alleyn, who purchased Dulwich in 1606, and who will figure prominently in what follows, endowed the College which he founded in the middle of the village with the manorial lands of Dulwich and other propertiy, he ordained that the title deeds which he had acquired (many of them already centuries old) and any subsequent leases granted by the College, should be carefully preserved, and such indeed has generally been the case.  These archives, the bulk of which are kept in the Wodehouse Library at Dulwich College (although some of them remain at the Estates Office), are a veritable treasury of information about our predecessors and the lands and houses which they occupied.  They comprise not only leases and other documents of title, but manorial rolls, rent books, accounts of legal disputes, and letters, and when taken in conjunction with public records such as probate inventories and the like, it is possible to build up a considerable volume of data about life long ago.

That having been said, the picture is not, and can never be, complete.  The documents which have survived are of a predominantly legal nature, and although they may tell us who was living where and when, they rarely (and only then by accident) reveal how these people spent their lives and what sort of people they were.  For some localities archaeological excavation may occasionally turn up an artefact or the foundation of a long-forgotten building which throw a useful light on such aspects, but unfortunately Dulwich is, for the moment at any rate, sadly deficient in such evidence.  What we have to go on, therefore, are the written records, and naturally the further back in time we go, the less abundant these are.

The name Dulwich is, whichever interpretation one accepts, of Anglo-Saxon origin, but whether there was a settlement here in even earlier times we do not know.  Some signs of Roman occupation have been found in Camberwell, and personally I suspect that there may be the remains of a Roman villa or two somewhere in the locality (the north side of Dulwich Park would be a good place to start looking).  The heavy clay soil would have been difficult to work without modern techniques, although a few years' perseverance would have paid dividends.  The lack of running water a distinct drawback, although no doubt the provision of an adequate number of ponds and wells could have overcome this, but in other respects, with its sheltered position an hour's ride from London, the site would have been ideal for some wealthy Roman to set up home.  In fact, anyone endeavouring to create a settlement much further north would have encountered the Southwark and Bermondsey marshes, with their risk of flooding and generally unhealthy air.

However, this is mere conjecture, and the first intimation that Dulwich had acquired a separate identity does not come until A.D. 967, when King Edgar granted to one Alphea and his wife Elswite, 20 hides in Merton, "5 hides in a place called Dilhwis", and some marshland adjoining the Thames, in perpetuity.  Such Ango-Saxon charters are quite numerous, and are especially valuable for the historian where they define the boundaries of the land which is being granted.  In this present case, the landmarks for Merton are given in some detail, but those for Dulwich are not mentioned at all.  The only useful information we can therefore extract are the names of the grantees and the fact that Dilhwis (or Dulwich) comprised 5 hides.  A hide is generally reckoned to have been about 120 acres (or enough to sustain four farming families), which gives a total of about 600 acres, and when one takes into account the woods and wastes this figure tallies tolerably well (as we shall see) with the area of Dulwich under cultivation in Edward Alleyn's time.  Dulwich was therefore, in A.D. 967, 'on the map', although whether it could be said to be a community, as opposed to a mere collection of fields, is of course another matter.

We would expect William the Conqueror's Domesday Survey of 1086 to cast some light on this aspect, but unfortunately it does not, as Dulwich's name is conspicuous (to us) by its absence.  One should not infer from this that it had ceased to exist; it may have been omitted accidentally (there are many English villages of which this can be proved to be so), or it may have been included, unnamed, with some other manor.  If the latter, then the manor in question is likely to have been Battersea, the area of which before the Conquest is given as 72 hides, far bigger than that part of London is today, and which is known to have included Peckham.  Tellingly, the site on Sydenham Hill on which the Crystal Palace used to stand was, for many centuries, part of Battersea Parish as well as being in Penge.  In 1066 Battersea, in Brixton Hundred, had been held by Earl Harold, and, after his death at Hastings, by William I himself, who gave it to Westminster Abbey in exchange for its manor of Windsor.  However, two pieces of evidence, one of them of a somewhat curious nature, tend to contradict this hypothesis.

In 1261 (as mentioned by W.H. Blanch in 'Ye Parish of Camerwell', publ. 1875) a question arose as to whether the manors of Dulwich and Leigham (in Streatham) were liable to pay tillage.  Reference was made to an earlier enquiry on the same subject held by Hugh Bigot, the King's Justiciar, who had decided that as these manors had been 'ancient demesne of the Crown', they were liable to be taxed "only when the King caused his demesnes throughout England to be tallied".  What is odd about this is that to the medieval lawyer the expression 'ancient demesne' had a very precise legal significance.  It described land which had been held by the king himself in the time of Edward the Confessor ('T.R.E.', as Domesday Book constantly puts it) whose inhabitants continued to enjoy certain well-defined privileges even if the king subsequently disposed of it.  In cases of dispute, the only authority as to whether a manor was or was not 'ancient demesne' (or so historians have generally believed) was Domesday Book, yet here we have a manor classified as ancient demesne which is not even mentioned in the Conqueror's great survey.  If the historians are wrong, and Hugh Bigot had access to, and was allowed to rely on, some evidence which is not available to us, then Dulwich could not have been part of Battersea manor, but was held personally by the king, for although we might regard Earl Harold as the rightful successor of Edward the Confessor, the Norman English did not.

The second piece of evidence which seems to confirm this view is that, only one generation after the Conquest, if not in 1066 itself, Dulwich had indeed come into the king's own hands, for in 1127 William I's son, Henry I, granted out of his own demesne "Rodereyum et Dilewic et Hidam de Southwark et Wadonam" (i.e. Rotherhithe, Dulwich, the hide of Southwark, and Waddon) to the priory of St Saviour's of Bermondsey.  The Cluniac house of St Saviour's had been founded by Alwyn Child, a wealthy London citizen, and in 1094 William II endowed it with the manor of Bermondsey and the new church there.  Until its dissolutionn four and a half centuries later, the Priory and later the Abbey of Bermondsey was to retain possession of Dulwich and, we may be sure, farmed it with as much efficiency as was possible in those days.  The rich and powerful monastic houses which owned so much of England during the middle ages were generally extremely adept at property management, and careful records were kept of which tenants farmed how much land, what they produced and what rent and/or services they owed.  The monasteries could thus keep abreast of current trends and alter policy, for instance laying greater emphasis on stock- or sheep-rearing instead of crop production, as circumstances affected profitability.  Such records have survived for many religious houses, but again we are singularly unfortunate in that those for Bermondsey Abbey do not appear to have done so, apart from miscellaneous documents scattered among the various class lists in the National Archives, and one Rent Book of 1483 kept in the Canterbury Cathedral archives which is in such poor condition that it is not available to researchers.

Since we are not concerned with the history of the Abbey itself, except insofar as the policy of successive priors and abbots may have affected life in Dulwich, we rely on other sources to arrive at some idea of what medieval life in the village was like.  There are many such sources, but arguably the most important are the manorial court rolls, which (with several gaps) cover the period 1333 to 1903

[Written on 21/9/1998 or earlier.  Amended and re-formatted 10 July 2024.]