Young Reporter The origins of the name Gravesend By Robert Pownall Gravesend Grammar School
It would be a foolish thing to think that the town is named because during the plague the bodies of those from London floated down the river and hence the term Graves-end was produced. This is most definitely not the case and there are various other possibilities for the name that we have all come to know and love in Gravesham. One of these possibilities is the fact that the town was recorded as Gravesham in the Domesday Book of 1086 as belonging to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux: and the name could possibly be derived from "graaf-ham": the home of the Reeve, or Bailiff, of the Lord of the Manor. Another plausible alternative is that the name Gravesham may be a corruption of the words grafs-ham – a place "at the end of the grove".Frank Carr has said that the name derives from the Saxon Gerevesend, the end of the authority of the Porters, (originally Portgereve), the officer in charge of the town. Another variation is Graveshend and it can be seen in a legal record of 1422, where Edmund Langeford was the parson. Gravesham was however adopted in 1974 as the name of the new Borough, and the main town of the bourogh still remains as Gravesend.
