Immediately to the west of the church extend the grounds of Fulham Palace, which run for some distance alongside the river, where a strip has been modernised and provided with an embankment wall, and opened to the public as the “Bishop’s Park”; Fulham Palace and its wide-spreading lands forming the “country seat” of the Bishops of London, whose “town house” is in St. James’s Square. The Bishops of London have held their manor of Fulham continuously for about nine centuries, and are said in this respect to be the oldest landed proprietors in England. Here they have generally maintained a considerable degree of state and secluded dignity, hidden among the luxuriant trees and enclosed within the dark embrace of a sullen moat, which to this day encircles their demesne, as it probably has done since the time when a body of invading Danes wintered here in A.D. 880-1. This much-overgrown moat is a mile round, and, together with the surrounding ancient muddy conditions which were remarkable enough to have given Fulham its original name of the “foul home,” or miry settlement, must have proved a very thorough discouragement to visitors, both welcome and unwelcome. Fulham Palace does not look palatial, and its parts are very dissimilar. The two principal fronts of the roughly quadrangular mass of buildings face east and west. That to the east was built by Bishop Howley in 1815, and has the appearance of the usual modest country mansion of that period; while the west front, which is the oldest part of the Palace, and dates from 1502-1522, when the then dilapidated older buildings were cleared away, is equally typical of the less pretentious country-houses of the age. It was Bishop Fitzjames who rebuilt this side, and his approach gateway and the tower by which the Palace is generally entered, remain very much the same as he left them. A modest, reverend dignity of old red brick, patterned, after the olden way, with lozenges of black, pervades this courtyard, upon which the simply framed windows still look, unaltered. The sculptured stone arms under the clock upon the tower are those of Bishop Juxon, more than a century later than the date of these buildings, and have no connection with the position given them here in modern times.