The chapel of Croydon Palace, built under Archbishops Laud and Juxon between 1633 and 1663, occupies the site of a much earlier place of worship that is often referred to in ecclesiastical records. No trace of it, however, remains, and its successor has suffered much in the various vicissitudes through which it has passed. It was divided from the see of Canterbury in 1780, and secularised in 1807, after which it served for some time as an armoury for the local militia, and was put to other even less dignified usages. In 1887 it was bought, with the {152} banqueting-hall, by the Duke of Newcastle, who presented both to the sisters of the Church Extension Society, and it is now an orphanage under the care of the Kilburn sisters. The Saxon church of Croydon, or Croidene, as it was then spelt, referred to in the Doomsday Survey--whose priest, Ælffic by name, was one of the witnesses to a will still extant dated 960--probably rose, as did its Norman successor, from an islet in the midst of the head-waters of the Wandle, which united to form that tributary of the Thames in what was known as My Lord's or Laud's Pond in the palace grounds. Near to this church were a great water-mill and a huge dam, but this was not the mill of Doomsday Book, all trace of which is lost. The huts of the original settlement, of which a few interesting relics were discovered when the excavations were made for the railway, probably extended from the church in the direction of Beddington, but those that formed the nucleus of the new town, and were chiefly occupied by charcoal-burners, were grouped near the church on the Haling side. Until the completion in 1850 of the admirable modern system of drainage, the whole of the now healthy district of Croydon was frequently flooded, and for several centuries the inundations were looked upon as supernatural visitations that could not be averted, but were tokens of impending evil or good fortune. References to this strange belief are of frequent occurrence in the contemporary press, the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey, to quote but one {153} case in point, writing: 'Between this place (Caterham) and Coulsdon ... issues out sometimes a bourne which overflows and runs down to Croydon. This is held by the inhabitants to be ominous, and prognosticating something remarkable approaching, as it did before the happy restoration of Charles II. in 1660; also before the Plague of London in 1665.'