Camden History Society

Over 100 years of Court Rolls of the Manor of Hampstead (16th - 18th century), translated into English by commission by the Society, have been uploaded onto our website and can be viewed and downloaded from the Hampstead Court Rolls page. They afford interesting glimpses, sometimes distorted or dim, into the development of the manor, which originally belonged to the monks of Westminster Abbey and stretched from Kilburn and Chalk Farm in the south to North End Way via the villages of West End and Pondstreet and the town of Hampstead itself. Lordship of the Manor was in the hands of a single family from 1620 to 1706, although by the the time of their arrival the manor had greatly shrunk in acreage by the detachment of Belsize in the 12th century and Chalk Farm in the 15th. This didn't deter the Lady of the Manor in the 1690s from trying to extort rent from the owners of the detached parts.

Peter Woodford has been transcribing the translation of the Rolls into electronic form since the beginning of the project in 2005 and has some more intriguing tales to tell from their detailed perusal.