Last modified: 4 October 2026
Working research notes — started, added to, and revisited as new material turns up. Each page grades its own claims by how well they're corroborated, rather than presenting everything as settled.
— Notes — Early Protestant Settlement in Wandsworth — Dutch brass-founders in the 16th century, and the French Huguenot hatters who followed after 1685.
— Notes — Wandsworth's Presbytery — The 1539 execution of the parish's own vicar, and the 1572 “Orders of Wandsworth,” among the earliest Presbyterian church orders in England.
— Notes — Wandsworth's Quakers — The meeting house's history, a disputed William Mead/William Penn connection, and Wandsworth's early Quaker schools — including a claim that Voltaire was taught English at one of them.
— Notes — Mount Nod — A gazetteer of Mount Nod and Mount Noddy place-names across England, and an open question about what the name actually means.
— The South Sea Company — What the asiento actually covered, why “South Sea” evoked Peruvian silver the Company never touched, and why Wandsworth wills go on mentioning South Sea Stock decades after the 1720 crash.
— Notes — Paul Fourdrinier and His Descendants — The Huguenot engraver buried at Mount Nod, the Fourdrinier papermaking machine, and his great-grandson, Cardinal John Henry Newman.
— Notes — Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge — A remarkable c.1480 memorial brass of two women, and Judith Bennett's reading of it as a same-sex companionate memorial.
— Notes — The Gravel Beneath Wandsworth Common — Thames terrace gravel, what it was dug for across the centuries, and how the old pits became the Common's lakes.
— Notes — Philip Cazenove — The Huguenot-descended founder of the stockbrokers Cazenove & Co., his house on Battersea Rise, and the churches he paid for, including St Michael’s, Wandsworth Common, built in his memory.
— Notes — Peter Paggen, from Pettigrew’s Freedom’s Debt — The tobacco merchant of the Manor House, East Hill: separate trader, lobbyist against the Royal African Company, and the Paggen–Hale–Morice family.
— Notes — Peter Paggen, Humphry Morice and the slave trade — Paggen’s 25 and his son-in-law Morice’s 92 slaving voyages from the SlaveVoyages database, the Whydah, the Bank of England fraud, and a sortable register of all the voyages.