Otford Palace Otford Palace Otford Palace, also known as the Archbishop's Palace, is in Otford, an English village and civil parish in the Sevenoaks District of Kent. The village is located on the River Darent, flowing north down its valley from its source on the North Downs. The King of Mercia, "Offa", fought the Kentish Saxons in 776 at the Battle of Otford. From those times until 1537, the palace was one of the chain of houses belonging to the archbishops of Canterbury. It was rebuilt around 1515 by Archbishop Warham to rival that of Cardinal Wolsey at Hampton Court. Henry VIII
Ford Palace which are of early Tudor date. Gough wrote that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1533 – 1555) "seems to have been particularly attached to [Ford Palace], ... [involving it] inextricably with the progress of the English Reformation." He was at the palace in 1535 when he wrote to King Henry VIII concerning the prior of Blackfriars, Canterbury, who had objected to his preaching against the Pope, and in 1536, when he wrote to Thomas Cromwell regarding a question of consanguinity. The year after, Cranmer left Lambeth Palace for Ford to escape an instance of plague, having concluded a meeting of bishops that