CHRISTMAS GHOSTS AT BARNET AND ENFIELD CHASE will - geofrrey manderville  walk again?

Christmas ghosts in Barnet and Enfield Chase

Trent Park and Oak Hill Park in Barnet  are areas  long reputedly haunted by the notorious Geoffrey de Mandeville (1092-1144) custodian of the Tower of London, Sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire and Middlesex. One of the most powerful and wicked bailiffs and warlords of his era,  he blatantly abused his powers, turning to wholesale extortion and plunder, looting chattels and livestock as he wished.

Traces of a moated fort or castle  which served as his base are still visible in Trent Park today, an earthwork known as Camlet Moat. For his criminal extortion de  Mandeville was declared an outlaw. He retreated into the Fenlands and  used the Isle of Ely and Ramsey Abbey as his headquarters.  There he forged an alliance with  another renegade sheriff sharing his taste for plunder,  the rebellious Hugh Bigod of Bungay, Suffolk, one time lord of half of East Anglia, a man strong enough to defy the King. However, pursued by forces loyal to King Stephen, in 1144 Mandeville was tracked down and besieged at another  castle, situated at Burwell in Cambridgeshire. Here he was slain by an arrow. Excommunicated before his death, traditions holds Mandeville haunts  Saffron Walden Castle in Essex, parts of West Suffolk and especially  the Barnet area at Christmas time.

Alternative Enfield traditions aver  de Manderville  did not die at Burwell but drowned in a well at Camlet Moat whilst recovering his loot.  In 1924, following an excavation,  rumours spread across East Barnet  that his ghost walked Christmas time.

 In 1926 an East Barnet Council night-watchman named John Gibson reported hearing footsteps and clanging sounds (taken to be armour) coming from the stable blocks of a property called the Grange. On 19 December 1926 he saw an apparition ‘a tall figure in a long military cloak….I could see right through him; there was nothing but a skeleton.” East Barnet Council put a shilling  on his weekly wages.

  The following year the Barnet Psychical Research Society publicly announced  Manderville would materialise on Christmas Eve. This  resulted in a boisterous mob gathering, hoping to witness  the apparition. Some claimed hearing strange underground rumblings but no ghost appeared.  Police were required to disperse the disappointed crowd.  

In 1928  a member of the London Spiritualist Society reported seeing a vague figure gliding towards East Barnet parish church before veering off in the direction of Trent Park to  disappear inside a hedge, accompanied by a sound of clanking spurs.  The Barnet Psychical Research Society tried again in December 1932, claiming they briefly observing a figure interpreted as a knight wearing a plumed helmet accompanied by sounds like  clinking  spurs. (Sunday Dispatch 24 Dec 1932). Optimistic watchers continued  gathering over the next 15 years until at least 1946-47, with the London Evening News encouraging the belief the ghost appeared seasonally through to New Year. Thereafter de Manderville joined an ever-increasing host of spectres in the area, so many that by the mid-1990s the local paper the Barnet Press even set-up a ghost ‘hotline’ to receive reports (for a detailed guide to the legendary history and the breathless psychic claims and fantasy attached see  Jennie Lee Cobban’s entertaining Geoffrey de Mandeville and London's Camelot: Ghosts, Historical Mysteries and the Occult in Barnet (2013)).

I visited Camlet Moat some years back, along with members of the Ghost Club. It survives as a modest sized earth and water fortification, like a little islet. Studded with trees and holly bushes it is tucked away to the north of  Trent Park, reached by a narrow earthwork causeway. 

We found the site a possessed a peaceful and auspicious atmosphere, and was a curiously silent place, with little sign of birds or insects at the heart of the Moat. This sense of remoteness is all the more mystifying given it lies no great distance from the Hadley Road, crossing Enfield Chase.

Interestingly, this road has attracted stories of  motorists encountering strange electrical light-forms and apparitions after dusk in recent years, so perhaps this Christmas may be worth a spot of ghost hunting there….

Jennie Lee Cobban Geoffrey de Mandeville and London's Camelot: Ghosts, Historical Mysteries and the Occult in Barnet (2013).