Alfred the Great inherited Greenwich in 918. © NMM
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| Alfred the Great inherited Greenwich in 918. © NMM |
It may have been part of a military post beside the old London to Dover road, which ran at that time through the Park. Coins found there suggest that the shrine was built in the 1st century AD and remained in use until the Romans left Britain in the 4th century.
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| Parish church of St Alfege, Greenwich. © NMM |
In AD 871 King Alfred the Great inherited Greenwich and in 918 his daughter, the widowed Countess of Flanders, presented it to the Abbey of St Peter at Ghent.
Early in the 11th century Greenwich was briefly occupied by Viking raiders – to whom it probably owes its name ('green place') and its patron saint, Alfege, Archbishop of Canterbury. Vikings murdered him at Greenwich in 1012 and he was buried where the parish church of St Alfege now stands.
In 1414 the manor of Greenwich reverted from the Abbey of Ghent to King Henry V. In 1426 it passed to his half-brother, the soldier and scholar Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who built a house called 'Bellacourt' on the river's edge.
Its foundations, now under the Grand Square of the Old Royal Naval College, show it was originally a rectangular building about 21 metres (70 feet) long and on two floors.
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| The Tudor Palace of Greenwich. © NMM |
Bellacourt was subsequently expanded as the royal palace of Pleasaunce or 'Placentia' and it was here that Henry VIII was born in 1491.