Kempton Park, Surrey

Kempton Park, England formerly an expanded manor known as Kempton, Kenton and other forms, today refers to the land owned by (estate in property of) the Jockey Club: Kempton Park nature reserve and Kempton Park Racecourse in the Spelthorne district of Surrey. Today's landholding was the heart of, throughout the Medieval period, a private parkland – and its location along with its being a royal manor rather than ecclesiastic, or high-nobility manor led to some occasional residence by Henry III and three centuries later hunting among a much larger chase by Henry VIII and his short-reigned son, Edward VI. Kempton appears on the Middlesex Domesday Map as Chenetone a soon-after variant of which was Chennestone (the "k" sound rendered with "ch" and n's proceeded with an "e" due to the early Middle English orthography used by those scribes) later written, alongside data proving a period of regal use, as Kenyngton. The period of the last's writing was a source of ambiguity as it coincided with common forms of writing Kennington in Surrey. A wooded demesne at heart — the first Kempton Park was inclosed by royal licence in 1246. Its farmed-out outland smallholdings were for much of its history a considerably smaller manor than that of Sunbury, in which parish the whole estate is. Most of the ward of Sunbury East was in medieval times part of Kempton, as was the land of the Stain Hill Reservoirs and Kempton Park Reservoirs. No trace can be found of the chief tenant enjoying more than permissive, informal rights such as his tenants sharing in pasture on the common in the north of the parish of Sunbury, in which parish the manor lay.