SWEET HAMPSTEAD.

‘A village revelling in varieties.’

Leigh Hunt.

A Bit of Old Hampstead, New End.

SWEET HAMPSTEAD
AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS.

BY
MRS. CAROLINE A. WHITE.

‘When shall we see you at sweet Hampstead again?’

Constable.

LONDON:
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1900.

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO THE
CONSERVATORS OF THE HEATH,
AND TO
ALL WHO LOVE ‘SWEET HAMPSTEAD’
FOR ITS OWN SAKE.
THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

As illustrating the very common axiom that extremes meet, a preface at the beginning of a book is, as a matter of course, the last thing that is written. In the present instance, having stated my reasons for writing ‘Sweet Hampstead’ in the introductory chapter, a preface seems almost redundant. Moreover, I have an idea that prefaces as a rule are not popular reading, but literary custom being stronger than private opinion, I must revoke my heresy.

It is very many years since the thought of writing the story of Hampstead occurred to me. I found that previous writers had left the most important period of its local history, and the most interesting personages who had vitalized it, with little more than a passing reference; and thence it was that the desire to occupy unbroken ground took possession of me.

But the years alluded to were amongst the busiest of a busy life, when I was ‘coining my brains for drachmas,’ or their equivalent in British currency, and had no time for the dreamland of topographical speculation. The engagements, however, that hindered my design opened up many sources of material for future use; and as topography is always a literary mosaic, their diversity tended to enrichment.

Thus it came to pass that the first draft of my book was laid aside, but never forgotten, for more than thirty years, and has only recently been reverted to—a task that has been a delight, bringing back—though sometimes through a mist of tears—images of the past, with pleasant memories of sunny days that, looked at from the perspective of eighty-nine years, seem brighter even than sunshine is itself.

From such a pile of years I almost lose the author’s dread of the critic. Praise or blame are to me now much the same; but, being a woman, I still prefer the praise.

I cannot close these preliminary words without expressing my obligations to Mr. P. Forbes for the eight sketches he has permitted to be copied for the beautifying of the book; to Messrs. Oetzmann for some illustrations so kindly lent; to Mr. Baines, not only for a similar favour, but for help from his valuable ‘Records of Hampstead’; and to the proprietors of the Municipal Journal for the charming picture of the viaduct.

My thanks are also due to Mrs. Rosa Perrins, to Miss Kemp, Miss Quaritch, and Mr. M. H. Wilkin, who have all kindly assisted me. I also desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Lloyd, of Highgate, for information gathered from his clever lecture on ‘Caen Wood and its Associations.’ To the courtesy and kindness of Mr. G. W. Potter I owe much original material, and many interesting notes; and I also desire to thank Mr. C. A. Ward for the personal interest he has taken in my work, and the great help he has ungrudgingly given me in preparing and correcting it for the press. I can only add that should my book be found so readable as to convey to others some share of the pleasure I have felt in writing it, or lead in more capable hands to future research and a fuller development of a delightfully interesting topic, ‘Sweet Hampstead’ will have fulfilled its intention, and I can sing with an unknown poet of the sixteenth century:

‘Now cease, my lute: this is the laste

Labour that thou and I shall waste,

And ended is that we begun;

Now is this song both sung and past:

My lute, be still, for I am done.’

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

‘SWEET HAMPSTEAD’ AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

‘But if the busy town

Attract thee still to toil for power or gold,

Sweetly thou mayst thy vacant hours possess

In Hampstead, courted by the western wind.’

Dr. Armstrong.

To the inhabitants of London and its suburbs a history of Hampstead and the Heath may seem wholly unnecessary. What London lad who has not fished in and skated on its ponds, played truant in its subrural fields and lanes, gone bird-nesting in its woods, or spent delightful, orthodox half-holidays upon the heath?

As for the free brotherhood of the lanes and alleys before the plague of Board schools afflicted them, or the Board of Works stood sponsor for the preservation of the Heath, what hand’s breadth (of its mile-wide waste) of its hundreds of acres was there that they did not know and continue to renew acquaintance with on every recurrence of the high festivals of Easter and Whitsuntide?

But it is not of ‘’Appy ’Amstead’ that I am about to write, but of that older Hampstead the materials for the history of which lie scattered through many books not often read, and in the correspondence of dead men and women.

Lysons and Park are not for general readers, and such works as William Howitt’s ‘Northern Heights’ and Baines’s ‘Records of Hampstead’ are not companionable volumes. Yet I know of no intermediate work between them and mere guide-books.

Hence it occurred to me that I might fill a vacant place in the literature of ‘Sweet Hampstead,’ and give to others, without the toil, the pleasure I have had in recalling forgotten incidents connected with it, and memories of some of the celebrated men and women who, from the days of Queen Anne till our own, have added to the intrinsic delights of the place the charm of their association with it.

When the idea of undertaking ‘this labour of love’ occurred to me, the window near which I loved to write commanded a last fragmentary view of Gospel Oak Fields, which divided Hampstead from the parish of St. Pancras. These fields were even then (early in the sixties) in the hands of speculative builders, but a few green hedges, a group of elms, a pollard oak or two—scions, perhaps, of the traditionary one that for centuries had given its name to these now obliterated prata et pasturas—remained.

Ten years previously the hollow trunk of a very aged tree (fenced round) was still standing, and was locally said to be the remains of the original Gospel Oak, one of the many so called, in various counties of England, from the use made of them by the Preaching Friars, who under their shade were wont to read and explain the Scriptures to the people. It was at that time, and for years afterwards, used as a boundary tree, when once in three years the clergyman, parochial authorities, and charity children perambulated the boundaries of the parish of St. Pancras, of which it was the terminus in this direction.

Where Fleet Road is now, the shallow remnant of the once ‘silvery Fleet,’ as Crosby calls it in his ‘Additional Notes,’ written only a very few years before the period I am writing of, ‘meandered, irrigating those charming meadows which reach on either side of Kentish Town.’

South End Road, 1840.

In my time it crept, a sluggish stream, a mere ditch in dry weather, but after copious rain it rose suddenly, brimming to its margin, to disappear at the end of Angler’s Lane by a subterranean channel under part of Kentish Town, where it once more came to light as a narrow runlet in the main road that was easily stepped over. There were persons then living who remembered this portion of the river, a limpid stream flowing by the west side of Kentish Town towards King’s Cross, for it is not much more than half a century since it was arched over and built upon.

The fields through which it passed showed signs of its meanderings, and were still lovely with trees that had figured in many an artist’s sketch-book, and had thence imparted the refreshment of their pictured beauty to many a home.

The footpath through these meadows from Kentish Town followed the curve of an old rivulet scarcely dry in places, the whole course of which was traceable in the wavering line of aged willows, hollow and splintered, but putting forth hoar green branches above the exhausted stream that had once fed their roots.

This was Mary Shelley’s lovely walk from Kentish Town through the fields, with their fine old elms and rivulets and alder-trees, and a view to the north of the wooded heights of Highgate. In her time Carlton Road and the region thereabouts were all meadows.

This path led over the easiest of stiles through a little lane between hedges of hawthorn and elder by an old nursery garden and cottage where strawberries and cream were to be had in the season, and a cup of tea at all times, and so to South End or such portion of it as was not already changed to railway uses. The houses here were of a humbler description than those in the Flask Walk, but there were sufficient indications in little garden-borders, in roses trained about the doors, in vines wholly untrained, running to an excess of leafiness over walls and roofs, in a group of straw bee-hives, sheltered in a corner, to show how pretty and rustic the place had once been. There was the down-trodden, worn-out Green, with its white palings and rickety turnstile, in itself a protest to the farther use of it, and lime-trees, out of all proportion to the small houses you saw between them, large-limbed and flourishing.

An ascending row of houses to the right, on what is now South Hill Park, occupied the levelled slopes the summits of which when I first knew the lovely neighbourhood afforded charming views, and not the least charming that of the eastern outskirts of Hampstead, sweeping up amidst a profusion of foliage towards the high ground about Squire’s Mount, with a foreground of water and groups of trees studding the undulating surface, the fields on the east bounded by the remarkable mound which now bears the name of Parliament Hill, but was then known by the more striking one of Traitors’ Hill.

Ainsworth has made it memorable as the scene whence some of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot watched for the explosion of the Houses of Parliament at the hands of Guy Faux. Park, who refers to Stukeley’s ‘Itinerary’ on various occasions, takes no notice of this eminence.

Mr. Lloyd, in his published ‘Lecture on Caen Wood,’ tells us that when Mr. Bills purchased the estate of Sir James Harrington, amongst the properties belonging to it was a windmill, ‘which occupied the fine site of the summit of Parliament Hill, where the trench formed by the removal of its foundations is still to be traced. It was, doubtless, the Manor mill.’

Tumulus.

At one time it was presumed that, like the mound in the field to the right of the path to Highgate, which Lord Mansfield caused to be enclosed and planted with Scotch firs, it was a tumulus. In support of this idea there is a tradition of Saxon times still extant of this neighbourhood. Was it not about the skirts of Highgate that Alfred encamped with his troops to protect the citizens of London, whilst they gathered in the harvest from the surrounding fields, from Hastings of the Ivory Horn, who lay with his Danish army beside the Lea, ready to pillage them of their summer fruits? And might not some great battle have been fought, and have resulted in the raising of this mound? Alas for romance! When a few summers ago a child at play in its neighbourhood unearthed the hidden treasure of some threatened home, buried for safety’s sake in troublous times, or the booty of some thief, whose after-career interfered with his return for it, a search into the interior of the mound, under the direction of the County Council, dispelled the theories of the antiquaries and the dreams of romancists.[1]

But whatever its origin, the mound adds materially to the visual enjoyment of the visitor; and the sight of London from its height, especially at the early dawn of a clear summer’s day, is said to be worth a midnight pilgrimage to obtain. The air blows over its summit ‘most sweetly,’ especially in June, blending the scent of the lime blossoms from the sister villages with the aroma of the hayfields and hedgerows, where the honeysuckle and wild-rose bloom unmolested.

Facing round, we have Highgate Hill in view, with white modern houses showing here and there, and others roof-high in the foliage of surrounding trees. Of the ancient hamlet we see only a ridge of red-tiled roofs showing in the neighbourhood of the church.

To the north, where the grounds of Caen Wood come sweeping down to the brimming ponds, on which the swans ‘float double, swan and shadow,’ the landscape widens into one of rare beauty. Park-like beyond the park, in its alternations of lawny slope and little dells and groups of trees, it looks like a portion of the demesne, and not the least picturesque and lovely part of it.[2]

View of Highgate and Ponds.

To the west (a proper pendant to the view of Highgate) our vision closes with the spire of St. John’s Church, and the town of Hampstead stretching down a peninsula of houses in a sea of verdure, terminating in the fast-narrowing strip of green fields between Kentish Town and the St. John’s Wood estate on this side of Hampstead Road.

I specially remember a bit of landscape in which the red viaduct[3] in Sir Maryon Wilson’s demesne shows to much advantage on the grassy foreground between the wooded undulations of the park. It is still pretty, but ‘with a difference.’ Then a footway crossing the Heath led through an old gray, weather-beaten gate to a shady path, with a plantation of young trees on one side, and a hedgerow, redolent in summer of wild-rose and May, dividing it from a meadow on the other. The remains of a long-disused tile-kiln stood on the edge of the field, the red earth of which showed its fitness for such manufacture. This path led through upland fields to Highgate, and was a charming one, beloved by painter and poet. The last time I saw it the beauty was devastated, and the meadow changed into a brickfield, with a view to its conversion into a site for building on.

But I am forgetting, in my remembrances of the charming suburb, that from the earliest birth of a taste for natural beauty, Hampstead must have had a special interest for the inhabitants of London.

Beautiful as were the whole range of gently-swelling hills forming the background of the City, and long subsequent to Tudor times covered with dense woods, which encroached on the north and east even to its gates, and came down on the west as far as Tyburn, Hampstead Hill from its altitude, and the fact, as someone has written, that it ‘closed the gates of view in that direction,’ must have had an interest beyond the others.

Baines claims for Hampstead that it was a village before 1086; in other words, that the five manses, or homes of the villani and bordarii on the original clearing, which are mentioned as existing when Domesday Book was compiled, constituted a village. In 1410, at the time of the assignment of Hampstead, together with Hendon, to Henry Lord Scrope of Marsham for the maintenance of his servants and horses, he being then attending Parliament on the King’s service, it is included with Hendon, and styled a town (‘the towns of Hampstead and Hendon’).

Viaduct.

But in the reign of Henry VIII. it is again called a village, by which designation it continued to be called even in our own times, long after it had outgrown the dimensions of one, just as a beloved child when grown up retains the pet name given to it in infancy; and truly Hampstead continues to be the best-beloved of all the City suburbs.

A stone in the north aisle of the old church, dated 1658, recorded that John Baxter, Gent., had made it incumbent on the owners of a house ‘in Hamstede Streete, where Mr. Netmaker dwelleth’ (no other street apparently existed to make a prefix necessary), to pay the sum of £3 yearly to the poor of the parish. Someone of importance, no doubt, occupied the moated mansion and demesne of Caen Wood, and there are records of other great men and rich City merchants resident in the upland hamlet. A peep at the parish register,[4] the earliest date in which is 1560, affords us a clue to the growth of the population.

Subsequent to the above date, 1580-89, the baptisms averaged 13³⁄₁₀, the burials 6⅒. At the close of 1680-89 the baptisms amounted to 33⅗, the burials to 65⁹⁄₁₀, an excess accounted for by the visitation of the Plague (1664-65).

Towards the close of the eighteenth century (1790-99) the baptisms averaged 99⅗, the burials 141⅗,[5] a slow but steady growth, marvellously increased in modern times.

After the Great Plague, change of air in the summer season became an article of faith with the inhabitants of London, and an annual sojourn of some weeks in the country or at the seaside an established custom with all who could afford it, a custom which resulted on the part of the wealthy merchants and citizens in the hire or purchase of a country retreat in one or other of the suburbs.

Hampstead, towards the end of the Commonwealth, combined the advantages of ‘Air and Hill, and Well and School,’ and these favourable circumstances, added to its easy distance from London, recommended it to the City fathers and mothers, and made it, of all the rural villages in the neighbourhood of town, the most popular.

Though its high-pitched situation precluded at that period, and for a long time after, such an increase of buildings as lower situations were afflicted with, its position, fine air, and beautiful prospects made it much sought, and in the times of the Stuarts many notable persons in connection with the Court had houses here. Sir Henry Vane built his fine mansion on what was then called Hampstead Hill, and J. Bills, Esq., son of the printer to His Majesty, resided at Caen Wood; while my Lord Wotton had his country-house at Belsize. After the Restoration we find Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Attorney-General, residing at Hampstead, where he died, May 1, 1670, and though Pepys does not mention it, Sir George Downing, Secretary to the Treasury, who so often appears in the ‘Diary,’ and whom Pepys stigmatizes as a ‘sider with all times and changes,’ resided here, and had his house broken into and robbed (1685). From the St. James’s Gazette, published by authority, I find that, amongst other articles of which the thieves deprived Sir George, were the following items: ‘A large agate about the bigness of a crown piece, with Cupid and Venus and Vulcan engraved on it. A blue sapphire seal, set in gold, enamelled, with an old man and woman’s head engraved on it. A pomander,[6] set in gold. A locket, with fourteen diamonds and a crystal in the middle, engraved with two Cupids holding a heart over a cypher.’ This catalogue appeals to the sympathies of every lover of delightful bric-à-brac, but one fears the advertisement of them failed to recover the charming items, some of which may even yet find their way to one of the table-cases in South Kensington.

Every year appears to have added to the favour of Hampstead as a summer resort, a fact that was not lost upon the inhabitants, who were not slow to realize the benefit of these annual incursions.

Copyholds were readily procurable, and Hampstead was soon dotted about in various directions with weather-boarded or brick dwellings, so that by the end of the seventeenth century twelve houses had risen upon the demesne, two upon the freeholds, and 257 upon the copyholds, besides cottages, barns, brewhouses, etc., together with a dancing-room, shops, and other tenements in connection with the Wells.[7]

In the first year of the present century we find that Hampstead possessed 691 houses, which in 1811 had increased to 842, with 5,483 inhabitants, and there were seventeen houses building, and forty-five unlet.

In 1815, when Britton revisited it, he tells us that Hampstead, from a beautiful rural village, had become a town, with hundreds of mean houses (intended for lodging-houses) disposed in narrow courts, squares, and alleys, many of them uninhabited.

Yet the rate of building mentioned was insignificant compared with its after-progress. In 1861 the inhabited houses had increased to 4,340, with 385 uninhabited dwellings, and 169 more in course of building, while the population of the whole parish amounted to a total of 32,271 persons, a very remarkable feature in the succeeding census of Hampstead, 1871, being the preponderance of female inhabitants, who exceeded by 711 the entire population of the previous census in 1861.

If anything can invest these dry details with interest, it is the contrast they present between the Hampstead of the past and present. At the census of 1891 the inhabited houses numbered 9,528, with 687 uninhabited, 461 in course of erection, whilst the population in the four wards comprised in the parish of St. John amounted to 68,425 persons. The population of Hampstead at the present time (1898) is said to be about 78,000. In thirty years houses and inhabitants had doubled their numbers. The man who published a book in 1766, called ‘London Improved,’ which proposed to make the New Road, now Euston Road, the boundary of building in that direction, ‘otherwise the Hills of Hampstead and Highgate may be expected to become a considerable part of the suburbs of London,’ wrote prophetically, for London stretches out its infolding tentacles on all sides, and is only nominally divided from them. This New Road, as it continued to be quite recently called, though made under the Act of the twenty-ninth of George II. (1746) under the control of the Hampstead and Highgate trust, intersected level fields from Tottenham Court Road to Battle Bridge.

It takes us a little aside from the story of Hampstead, but is a pleasant prelude to it, and one can hardly refrain from giving a glance at the London approach to the beautiful village as it existed at the time of, and for a considerable period after the opening of the New Road.

Midway on the south side of the road stood the Bowling Green House, famous for nearly a century previously as a place of rural resort, and lower down the Brill Tavern, rather more ancient than its rival.

The Old Mother Red Cap public-house (and a nickname for a shrew of the first quality, whom a recent writer claims as a sutler and camp-follower of Marlborough’s,[8] but who appears to have kept this house as long ago as 1676, and to have been widely known by the unpleasant sobriquet of Mother Damnable, under which name some doggerel verses addressed to her are preserved in Caulfield’s Eccentric Magazine)—the Old Mother Red Cap, and old St. Pancras Church, were the only interruptions in the view of Hampstead from Bedford House, Queen Square, and the Foundling, except some groups of trees near St. Pancras, and in a lane leading from Gray’s Inn Road to the Bowling-Green House.

Gay and Pope both refer to the Tottenham Fields, and William Blake, painter and poet, sings of

‘The fields from Islington to Marybone,

To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood.’

Where Harrington and Ampthill Squares now stand ‘stretched fields of cows by Welling’s Farm,’[9] the reputed proprietor of 999 ‘milky mothers of the herd,’ which could never be increased to 1,000, a singular tradition common to the fields by Clerkenwell, and to the once green pastures between the Old Kent Road and Peckham. A lady well acquainted with Hampstead tells me that the same legend existed with regard to a local cow-keeper, a Mr. Rhodes,[10] in the early years of the present century.

A venerable friend of the writer’s in the fifties, an old inhabitant of the neighbourhood, remembered that where Francis Street now is there were fields called Francis’s Fields running up to the Tottenham Court Road, which few persons cared to pass through after dark. Some houses then below what is now Shoolbred’s had little gardens with green palings before them, which she specially remembered from the figures of the traditional blind beggar and his daughter, who so marvellously escaped the Great Plague of London, ornamenting one of them. Harrison Ainsworth has preserved the story in one of his graphically-written novels. A gentleman tells me that an old lady born in 1800, and only lately deceased, remembered as a child waiting in the evening at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street till a party of six or more persons collected, when, in fear of footpads, they were convoyed across the fields to Kentish Town by a watchman.

Camden Town, which had been begun to be built in 1791, consisted for the most part of one-storied brick or weather-boarded houses, the outlines of some of which could be traced in my own time, though heightened and otherwise altered. Other houses, with gardens and orchards lying wide apart, led up to the half-way house we have just mentioned—the Old Mother Red Cap—where, at the point where the roads to Hampstead and Highgate diverge, stood, as it still stands, Brown’s Dairy. A thatched cottage in those days, with deep eaves, and little leaded, diamond-paned casements sparkling under them. Over the half-hatch door of this rustic dairy-house ladies and children from the neighbourhood of the old-fashioned squares (who took their morning walk through a turnstile at the top of Judd Street, leading by hawthorn-shaded hedgerows to the open fields), were wont to refresh themselves with a cup of new milk, or equally innocent sweet curds and whey.

At the top of Tottenham Court Road, in the fields on the left-hand side, were the remains of a mansion, the removal of which my old friend Valentine Bartholomew, the artist, remembered. It gave its name to the road, and is said to have been a palace of Henry VIII.’s; it was taken down towards the end of the last century (1791).

On the same side of the way stood a well-known tavern and tea-gardens, called the Adam and Eve,[11] the bowery arbours, lawns, smooth bowling-green and garden-alleys of which have been ill-exchanged for the gin palace opposite its site.

This house is mentioned in the curious trial of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq., and others, in the King’s Bench, May 30, 1787, for conspiracy against his wife, Lady Strathmore—a postboy, one of the witnesses of the lady’s forcible abduction, having orders to hire a chaise with excellent horses, and wait at the Adam and Eve, described as on the road to Barnet. ‘Lady Strathmore, while shopping in Oxford Street, was made prisoner, and the peace officer who presented the warrant, a creature of her husband’s, under colour of taking her before Lord Mansfield, had her carriage driven up the Tottenham Court Road, Mr. Bowes himself on the box, where, meeting the postboy, he bade him follow in the chaise.’

Twenty-seven years afterwards Leigh Hunt tells us Mr. Bowes was still in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, expiating, on the debtors’ side of the prison, his misconduct to his wife, and the non-payment of the fine to which he had been condemned.

Ponds and pools of water were in those days common in the public ways, and one in the near neighbourhood of this house became, on an afternoon of September, 1785, the scene of the following brutal outrage:

A youth was suspected of picking a gentleman’s pocket close to the Adam and Eve, whereupon some of the by-standers took him to an adjoining pond and ducked him very severely. A sailor, not satisfied with the discipline of the crowd, threw him again into the water, and kept him under till he was drowned.

A little further on to the right of the road there stood in my time a high mound, covered with grass, beneath which was a reservoir which supplied the neighbourhood with water; it was removed, if my memory is correct, about 1846-47, when its site was occupied by one of the earliest experimental baths and wash-houses, which have since given place to some sunless houses, under the shadow of the Congregational Church, in what is known as Tolmer Square.

From this mound the road to Hampstead, a comparatively short period before the above date, was fringed with pastures to the right, and with gardens, fields, hedgerows, and orchards on the left, with only two or three cottages and a roadside alehouse between the Adam and Eve and the High Street, Camden Town.

Roads, in the present meaning of the word, there had been none subsequent to Roman times, till the Hanoverian succession. Even when the use of carriages made them necessary, they resembled those deep country lanes, not yet unknown in Devonshire and Essex, where in winter the mud imbeds the wheels of carts or waggons, or were mere pack-horse paths, with a raised causeway running through the midst, and a deep fosse of mud on either side. Such a road was that which, in Elizabeth’s time, ran up from Battle Bridge between the hedgerow banks of Maiden Lane to Green Street and Highgate, whence a path led by Caen Wood to what was then called Wildwood Corner, across Hampstead Heath to Pond Street, tree-shaded, with its wild banks full of primroses and violets in spring, and redolent of May a little later, but rendered all but impassable in winter from the rains and overflow of the many rivulets which drained the uplands into Pancras Vale.

I have before me a view of the ‘Hampstead Road, near Tomkins’ House,’ engraved by Charles White, probably a grandson of Robert White, a celebrated engraver, who died in 1704. A post-chaise, drawn by two horses, is depicted labouring up what appears to be a mere rugged track over rough heath-ground. The dome of St. Paul’s (finished in 1710) and the City spires and houses appear in the distance but the view exhibits a primitive and solitary country, only broken by clumps of trees, furze coverts, and hedgerows, and except a single cottage and the gable of a house (probably Tomkins’) no other habitation is to be seen.

As late as May, 1736, it is reported in the London Post ‘that Col. de Veil had committed one of the coachmen who was driving the Hampstead coach to Newgate, for getting out of the track he was in and assaulting the Hon. the Lady Cook Winford by driving his coach upon her, whereby he threw her and her horse into a deep ditch, and she was greatly hurt and bruised.’

The Hampstead Road was not made till 1772, when George III. was King, though the summit of the hill had been previously cut down. When Ogilby, in the time of Charles II. wrote his Guide, St. Giles’ Pound lay in the open country, and the way to Holborn, like Gray’s Inn Lane, was a pleasant rustic road. Tottenham Court Road lay between fields and market-gardens, sprinkled with houses of entertainment, some of which lingered long after the making of the present road. Gay tells us that in summer ‘the Tottenham fields with roving beauty swarms,’ and thirty years later some doggerel verses in Poor Robin’s Almanack inform us under the head of the month of May:

‘The ladies now, to take the air,

To Stepney or Hyde Park repair;

While many others do resort

For cakes and ale to Tottenham Court.’

In Pennant’s time, Oxford Street, then Oxford Road, had only a few houses on the north side of it. He remembered it ‘a deep hollow road, full of sloughs, with here and there a ragged house, the lurking-place of cut-throats’—a state of things the contrast to which was set forth in some crude lines of a song that a venerable relative, who died at the age of ninety-six, has often repeated to me, but of which I only remember—

‘That was the time for games and gambols,

When Oxford Street was covered with brambles,

Ponds, and sloughs, and running water,

Where now there’s nothing but bricks and mortar.’

This semi-rural state of things appears to have lasted west of Holborn for the first quarter of the present century. When Bedford House was built (1706), the north side of Queen’s Square was purposely left open that the inhabitants might enjoy the charming prospect before it, terminating in the Hampstead and Highgate Hills.

When Portland Place was planned, more than half a century later, the then Lord Foley insisted on a clause in a lease he held of the Duke of Portland to prevent the building of any street to intercept the pure air of Hampstead and Highgate from Foley House, a fact to which the width of Portland Place is attributable.[12]

Gray, writing from Southampton Row as late as the summer of 1759, tells his friend Palgrave that ‘his new territories command Bedford Garden, and all the fields as far as Hampstead and Highgate.’[13]

In contrast with the poet’s triumph in the beauty of his views, we find Sir Samuel Romilly, many years later, complaining, in a letter to his sister written from his chambers in Gray’s Inn, ‘that, having but one row of houses between him and Hampstead, a north-west wind, sharp as the piercing bise, blows full against his windows.’[14]

Long after this date, Rosslyn House and Park could be seen from Clerkenwell Green, and later still the green heights of Caen Wood were visible from Bedford Row.

One of the advantages that Ned Ward’s public-house in Red Bull Yard possessed was ‘commodious rooms, with Hampstead air supplied’; and I think it is Lysons who quotes the advertisement of a house of entertainment near Bagnigge Wells, the proprietor of which sets forth as an inducement for the favour of the public that his windows command fine views of Hampstead and Highgate Hills.

These details help us to realize the relation of Hampstead to London when its wooded crest could be seen from such distant points, and it had come to be regarded as the air-filterer and health invigorator of the whole district. Even as late as 1820, from the west of Oxford Street to the skirts of Hampstead Heath, there were green fields and pastures all the way.

CHAPTER I.
HAMPSTEAD AND THE HEATH.

Hampstead, situated in the Hundred of Oussulston and County of Middlesex, is separated from London by St. Pancras and Marylebone, and otherwise bounded by Finchley, Hendon, Willesden, and Paddington.

In the account of the several districts into which the Registrar-General has divided London, Hampstead claims the greatest elevation, standing 400 feet above Trinity high-water mark, a circumstance that, in connection with its gravelly soil, accounts for its dry, salutary air. It contains in its parochial area 2,169 acres.[15]

The early history of Hampstead lies very far back, though for all purposes of respectable antiquity—whether persons or places are concerned—an appearance in Domesday Book is sufficient. Hamestead, in its old, pleasant Saxon name, tells of a yet higher antiquity, and long before the astute Norman (in the language of the Saxon Chronicle) ‘sent forth his men to inquire how many hundred hides of land were in each shire, so that there was not a hide of land in England of which he knew not the possessor, and how much it was worth.’

Long before the existence of this pleasant schedule enabled the Conqueror to parcel out the fairest portions of the land to his favourite retainers, the five hides of land and five manses, or homes, of which this manor consisted, were said to have been given by King Ethelred, the gift being afterwards confirmed by Edward the Confessor, to the Abbey Church of St. Peter at Westminster.[16] These grants are said to be spurious—forged, in fact, by the monks, the mark of a pendent seal attached to one, and the wax adhering to the other, proving too much, such seals not being used in England till after the Conquest. But William, desirous of standing well with the Church, continued the grant of Hamsted to the Abbot of Westminster. At the making of Domesday Book, not another roof had risen on the manor. There were still five manses, the homes of villeynes and bordarii, the first small farmers having certain degrees of personal freedom, but dependent for their ground on several corporal and servile services rendered to the lord; the others, mere labourers, who paid rent in eggs, poultry, etc.

‘“The Abbot holds four hides (arable) land to three ploughs. To the demesne appertain three hides and a half, and there is one plough. The villeynes have one plough, and could employ another. There is one villeyne who has one virgate, and five bordars who have one virgate; and one bondman or slave. The woodlands afford pannage (beech-mast and acorns) for a hundred swine.

‘“The whole is valued at fifty shillings, of which Ranulph Peverel, who held one hide of the land under the Abbot, paid five shillings.”

‘There is nothing more undecided than the presumed value of the hide. Some writers say it represented as much land as employed a plough during the year. Another, that it meant as much land as would maintain a family. Spelman imagined it 100 acres. At one place in Domesday Book 20 acres are called half a hide.

‘“In Maldon in Essex there were five free men holding 10 acres of ground; of these Ranulph Peverel holds 5 acres, and Hugh de Montfort 5 acres; it was in the time of King Edward the Confessor worth tenpence, it is now [at Domesday] worth twelvepence.”’[17]

This Ranulph Peverel, a Norman high in the King’s favour, who held, as Camden tells us, estates in several counties of England, had married the discarded concubine of the Conqueror, the daughter of a Saxon noble, and one of the most lovely women of her time, and had given his own name to the King’s son by her—William Peverel,[18] subsequently Lord of Nottingham, and founder of the famous castle in the Peak—and if it had not been shown that such small portions of land were frequently held by noblemen in those times in different counties, probably as a nucleus to be added to as opportunities arose, one would have been inclined to doubt the identity of the owner of one hide of land at Hamstede with the Peverel whose descendants became so important in the history of England.

The original grant (or presumed grant) of Ethelred gives a certain spot of land, in the place called Hamstede, of five cassati—this word, we read, means hide—in perpetual inheritance, etc.

Very primitive must have been the Hamestead of those days, a group of clay-built or wattled huts, set down in a sheltered clearing, somewhere in the vicinity of the future Chapel of St. Mary, the site of the present parish church, in the district known as Frognal.

The uncleared ground above this settlement rose irregularly to the Heath, with great woods stretching dense and gloomy west, north, south, and east of it, and in places impinging on the sandy skirts of the Heath, originally the upheaved crust of an old sea-bottom, 100 feet deep, but then a waste of wild vert, on a surface of clay, sand, and gravel. These woods, or, rather, the great Forest of Middlesex, extended for centuries later on the east to Enfield Chace, and went crowding on in serried masses westward to the Chiltern Hills. All the surroundings were heavy with timbered shade, and hazardous from the wild beasts lurking there: wolves, boars, stags, and wild-bulls of the indigenous breed only just become extinct in the Craven district—a whole forest region, in fact, instinct with game.

Fitzstephen, the monk whose charming description of the country on the north-west of London reads like a prose idyll, tells us that in these woods were many yew-trees, and Camden, that the forest ‘was full of that weed of England, the oak,’ whilst the mast, or fruit of the beech, as we have seen, made part of the value of the manor in Domesday Book. Evelyn and W. J. Hooker assure us that in these woods grew the hornbeam, elm, and other indigenous sylva.

During the Saxon Heptarchy, the Roman Verulamium had become St. Albans, the shrine of the British protomartyr, and a place of great sanctity, to and from whence pilgrims were constantly moving. I know nothing of Roman roads, and am therefore quite neutral as regards opinion, but am aware that modern antiquaries have wholly overturned the belief of their fathers, and, while quoting Camden as a reliable and careful authority on other matters, ignore the old antiquary’s belief in the long-descended tradition that the Wanderers’ Way, or Watling Street, which passed from Kent to Cardiganshire, cutting through the great forest of Middlesex, in a straight line from station to station, passed by Hampstead Heath. ‘Not by the present road through Highgate, which was made by license of the Bishop of London 300 years ago, but that ancient one, as we gather from the charters of Edward the Confessor, which passed near Edgware.’

John Evelyn.

Old Norden states that on the northern edge of Middlesex the Roman road, commonly called the Watling Way, enters this county, leading straight from old Verulamium to London over Hamestead Heath; from whence one has a curious prospect of a most beautiful city and most pleasant country. Camden, again, tells us that ‘at the very distance that Antoninus in his Itinerary placeth Pulloniacæ, to wit, 12 miles from London, and 9 miles from Verulam, there remaineth some marks of an ancient station, and there is much rubbish digged up upon a hill which is now called Brockley Hill.’ No doubt Norden, with the fond zeal of a believing antiquary, had traced the road many a time to Edgworth (Edgware) and so on to Hendon, through an old lane called Hendon Wante.[19] So completely had this tradition entered into the faith of people generally that we find it embalmed in Drayton’s ‘Polyolbion,’ where, to paraphrase his figurative description of Highgate and Hampstead Hills, he emphatically adds of the latter:

‘Which claims the worthiest place his own,

Since that old Watling once o’er him to pass was known.’

Defoe, too, in his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us that he ‘went to Hampstead, from whence he made an excursion to Edgware, a little market-town on the way to St. Alban’s, for it is certain that this was formerly the main-road from London to St. Alban’s, being the famous highroad called Watling Streete, which reached from London to Wales.’

No traces of such a road have been found on Hampstead Heath, though Roman relics and proofs of Roman burial have been discovered there, and accepted by our oldest antiquaries as strengthening their theory of the Watling Way having skirted or crossed it. That there was a road from St. Albans to the Heath is curiously confirmed by an old French folio, published in Paris (time of Elizabeth), which explains the reasons why the Romans built a city on the site of the present London,[20] and states that ‘subsequent to the recall of the legions in consequence of its rapid growth and absorption of the population and commerce of the other great cities, it so raised the envy and indignation of their inhabitants, that the people of St. Albans threatened to come and destroy the rising city of London, until the Londoners advanced as far as Hampstead Heath, where they entrenched themselves, and prepared to do battle in defence of their homes.’ A writer in the New Monthly Magazine, commenting on this extract, says that the remains of the entrenchments are still pointed out.[21]

Dr. Hughson, writing of the Reed-mote, or six-acre field, formerly to the north-west of White Conduit House, and which was supposed to have been the site of a Roman camp, observes ‘that a Roman road[22] passed this way, we have great reason to believe, for from Old Ford we pass Mere (vulgarly called Mare Street), Kingsland, Islington, Highbury, the Hollow-way, Roman Lane, over Hampstead Heath through Hendon to Verulam.’ With the vanishing of the pilgrims’ route over Hampstead Heath, we lose the reason for the name of the hamlet suggested by Lysons, who supposed the wearied pilgrims on reaching the heath to exclaim at the sight of the city at their feet, ‘Hame-sted!’ the place of their home and the end of their journey. Park believes the homely name was given to it by the Saxon churls[23] who inhabited it previous to the date of the Domesday Survey.[24]

In the time of Abbot Leofstan, when Albanus[25] had become a very popular saint, ‘especially with merchants and traders going beyond sea, who sought his protection, and made rich offerings at his shrine,’ the state of the great forest, its ways infested not only with beasts of prey, but by ‘outlaws, fugitives, and other abandoned beings,’ with the probable effect of diminishing the revenues of his Church, set the Abbot seriously to the task of removing these obstructions. He had the woods in part cut down, rebuilt bridges, repaired rough places, and finally entered into a contract with a certain knight to defend the highway with two trusty followers, and be answerable to the Church for anything that might happen through his neglect.[26]

In the eighth of Henry III., the great Forest of Middlesex was ordered to be disforested, giving the citizens of London, as Stowe tells us, ‘an opportunity of buying land, and building, whereby the suburbs were greatly extended.’

But the disforesting appears to have been partial, and the building limited to the east. Hampstead retained its woods in all their savage wildness; the paths through them, to the terror of passengers, continued to be scoured by wild beasts, especially wolves, which had not all been extirpated when the ‘Boke of St. Alban’s’ was written.[27]

During Henry III.’s reign (1256) we find Richard de Crokesley, Abbot of Westminster, ‘“assigning the whole produce of Hamestede and Stoke for the celebration of his anniversary in that monastery by ringing of bells, giving doles during a whole week, to the amount of 4,000 denarii. A thousand to as many paupers on the first day, and the same dole to 500 others on the six days following. A feast with wine, a dish of meat and a double pittance to the monks in the refectory. A Mass by the Convent in copes, on the anniversary day; and four Masses daily at four different altars for the repose of his [the Abbot’s] soul for ever!” With many other daily forms and ceremonies. But the keeping of this commemoration was found to be so heavy a burden that the monks petitioned the Pope in less than ten years after the Abbot’s death to dispense with it, and he very sensibly sent his mandate to Westminster, dated 5 Kal. June, 1267, declaring that he found these things to abound more in pomp than the good of souls, and “that it was evident they accorded not with religion, nor were suitable to religious persons,” and recommending the monks to limit the mode of commemoration to their ideas of the dead Abbot’s deserts, and the advantages that had accrued to the monastery by his administration. Upon which the said manors and revenues became at the free disposal of the Abbot and Convent of Westminster, towards the welfare of the abbey; an annual portion of 10 marks being assigned for making such celebration as that sum would admit of for the said Richard de Crokesley.’[28]

At the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII., by way of a sop to the Church, created a new bishopric, that of Westminster, giving it for its diocese the county of Middlesex, of which he deprived London. Great part of the revenues of the dissolved monastery were settled upon the new bishopric, the manor and advowson of Hampstead making a portion of it, but in nine years the new Bishop had alienated his lands to such an extent that there was scarcely anything left to maintain ‘the port of a Bishop.’

In this reign, while the Manor of Hampstead was in the hands of the newly-made Bishop of Westminster, we find that a considerable part of the woods still covered the ground in this neighbourhood, as well as in that of Hornsey, and that game was still plentiful in them.

Of this we have proof in the proclamation of the King for the preservation of his sport in these places:[29]

‘A Proclamacion yt noe p’son interrupt the King’s game of Partridge or phesaunt.

‘Rex majori et vice comitibus London. Vobis mandamus, etc.

‘Forasmuch as the King’s most Royall Maᵗⁱᵉ is much desirous to have the games of hare, partridge, phesaunt, and heron p’served in and about his honor at his palace of Westm’ for his owne disport and pastime; that is to saye, from his said palace of Westm’ to St. Gyles in the Fields, and from thence to Islington to oʳ Lady of the Oke, to Highgate, to Hornsey Parke, to Hamsted Heath, and from thence to his said palace of Westm’ to be preserved and kept for his owne disport, pleasure, and recreacion; his highness therefore straightlie chargeth and commandeth, all and singular, his subjects, of what estate, condicion, so’er they be, that they, ne any of them, doe p’sume or attempt to hunt, or hawke, or in any means to take or kill any of the said games, within the precincts aforesaid, as they tender his favour, and will estchue the ymprisonment of their bodies and further punishment at his Ma’ts will and pleasure.

‘Et hoc sub p’iculo incumbenti nullatenus omittat.

‘Teste mæipso apud Westm’ vij. die Julij anno tricesimo Septimo Henrici Octavi. (1546.)’

This mandate was issued just six months before the King’s death, when his physical condition must have totally incapacitated him from the sport from which he interdicted others, and this in the face of repeated charters giving the citizens of London a right of free chase in the forests of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, the Chiltern country, and Kent as far as the river Cray. This proclamation helps us in imagination to a view of the then existing condition of the north-western suburbs—fields from the back of Gray’s Inn right away to Islington, a village of ‘cakes and cream’ in the midst of meadows; the uplands of Hampstead, Highgate, and Hornsey still covered with thick woods and coverts filled with game, whilst between them and the city stretched the open country, with here a wattled hut, and there a half-timbered house; the clack of mills resonant beside the willow-shaded Fleet, which had its rise at the foot of Hampstead Hill, and went running on through Gospel Oak Fields to Kentish Town and Pancras, and thence by Holborn to its outlet in the Thames at Blackfriars, where a creek rendered it navigable to Holborn Bridge.

There stood St. Pancras, or ‘Pankeridge,’ as Ben Jonson calls it, the oldest church in London with the exception of old Paul’s, ‘all alone, utterly forsaken, and weather-beaten,’ while on the breezy high ground at Hampstead a windmill or two gave animation to the scene.

During the reign of Henry VIII., a predicted inundation of the city drove the inhabitants to the hills, and Hampstead Heath appeared covered with hundreds of little huts and tents in which the credulous people sheltered themselves. The prediction, of course, failed, and the prophets only escaped the indignation of their dupes on finding their fears disappointed by avowing a mistake of a hundred years in their calculations.

During the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, Hampstead Woods continued to flourish, coming down on the east to the village of Cantleowes, or Kentish Town, while on the west they spread by Belsize, and what is now the Adelaide Road, to St. John’s Wood, where at the Domesday the Abbess of Barking held wood and pasture of the King for fifty swine.

More recently St. John’s Wood belonged to the Knights Templars. It was in this wood the unfortunate Babington took refuge from the fury of Elizabeth till driven forth by hunger.

With this Queen’s successor, and his favourite, Buckingham, Hampstead was a frequent hunting-ground, and to this day the plateau on the west Heath, locally known as the King’s Hill, commemorates the spot from which His Majesty was wont to see the hounds throw off.

In James’s reign and that of his son, Charles I., certain ‘fair edifices’ had arisen on the Heath and its vicinity for the accommodation and convenience of the Court when hunting and hawking in the neighbourhood. Of these old houses none exist to add to the archæological interest of the neighbourhood. It is impossible to imagine a finer foreground for a hunting or hawking party than the Heath, the natural beauty of the landscape lending itself most effectively to such scenes.

Who questions the locality of the wicked bon-mot of our Merry Monarch, who could never resist the temptation of saying a smart thing? When in the midst of a group of beauties, courtiers, and Churchmen (who particularly delighted in hawking), he observed of the church of Harrow-on-the-Hill that it was ‘the only visible Church he knew of.’

Towards the closing years of Charles I.’s reign (1647), the Great Hollow Elm at Hampstead (figured by Hollar in an engraving preserved amongst the pamphlets in the King’s Library in the British Museum) became an object of attraction to visitors. Remarkable for its size and supposed age, measuring 28 feet immediately above the ground in girth, with widely-spreading branches, and of great height, a sagacious speculator about the year 1647 (as appears from some verses addressed to it by Robert Codrington, of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1653) constructed a staircase of forty-two steps within the hollow trunk, with sixteen openings lighting it, which led up to an octagon turret fixed amongst the branches of the tree 33 feet from the ground. ‘The seat above the steps six might sit upon, and round about room for fourteen more.’ At this altitude spectators enjoyed a most glorious view, or, rather, a succession of them, and found themselves above every object in Middlesex with the exception of the church spire of Harrow.

From the open tableland on which it appears in the engraving, the great tree probably stood on the summit of the Heath, where the road now runs past Jack Straw’s Castle. On the same broadside on which the engraving appears are certain descriptive verses. This broadside seems to have been given away to the visitors, and the circumstance of its having been folded for putting in the pocket, and so worn out, accounts for the few copies of it in existence.

‘The Great Hollow Elm at Hampstead’ (as the broad sheet describes it) does not appear to have long survived its singular treatment. No subsequent records that I have met with mention it; but that it must have been the object of many a summer’s day pilgrimage to the Heath is evident, even in Puritan times, when Robert Codrington addressed his verses to it. In them he mentions the

‘beauteous ladies that have been

These twice three summers in its turret seen.’

In the same year (1647) a poetical stationer, commonly known as Michael Spark, but who, in moments of aspiration, fancifully called himself ‘Scintilla,’ tells us of a very curious use to which this sylvan upper chamber was put.

A foreigner, the fellow-countryman of Joannes a Commenius, as he pedantically styles John Amos Comenius, the Moravian grammarian and divine, had established a school at Hampstead for a ‘limited number of young gentlemen,’ the number being restricted to twelve, and these, Mr. Spark tells us, he spared no pains in training:

‘For he, on top of all (this tree) above the shade,

His scholars, taught; where they such verses made

As spread his honours, and do blaze the fame

Of Hampstead School—I’ll trumpet up the same!’

It is he who lets us into the seeming secret of the birth of the Wells, and sings of the

‘air, and hill, and well, and school,’

as if the reputation of each was publicly known and appreciated. Codrington indirectly tells us that the elm was attempted to be put to another use ‘by some of the new religion, that would make a preachment beneath its shade.’

In the reign of Charles II., when the Great Plague was ravaging London and the Merry Monarch and his merry Court had discreetly withdrawn from its neighbourhood, Hampstead and the Heath had other experiences, for hundreds of the wretched citizens who had fled from the city to the suburbs, driven forth from the village with scythes and pitchforks, lay down to die in the fields and woods and ditches in the vicinity. This was the occasion of the obloquy levelled at the Hampstead people by Taylor, the Water-poet. And as a consequence, having almost wholly escaped the visitations of 1603, Hampstead suffered considerably in 1665, when the burials—which in the first year of the plague numbered only seven, and in the next twenty-three—rose to 214, more than seven times the ordinary averages of the period.[30]

Twelve months later, when the Great Fire swept out as with the besom of destruction the germs of the plague, many of the fugitives from London watched from the Heath the destruction of their homes and property, the smoke of the city ascending ‘like the smoke of a great furnace,’ a smoke so dense and fearful that it ‘darkened the sun at noonday, and if at any time the sun peeped through, it looked as red as blood; through the long night there was no darkness of night;’ and, to add to these horrors, on the dreadful Wednesday night ‘the people of London, now of the fields,’ heard the murmur that the French were coming, and though, in the quaint language of the writer of the ‘City Remembrancer,’ ‘the women, naked and weak, did quake and tremble, many of the citizens began to stir themselves like lions or bears bereaved of their whelps, and “Arm! arm!” resounded through the woods and suburbs.’

These scenes, of which Hampstead Heath has been the centre, have long since faded out of the traditions of its inhabitants, like those of that still older night in 1588, when the cresset upon Beacon Hill blazed the approach of the Armada to its fellow on Hadley Church tower, and thence from cresset to cresset to the farthest North—scenes full of the tragic passions of human perplexity and terror.

The General Elections for Middlesex appear to have always taken place on Hampstead Heath. I read that at one of these meetings of the Middlesex freemen on the top of Hampstead Hill,[31] 1695, Admiral Lord Edward Russell made his appearance before the assembled voters, and was returned without opposition.

These meetings occasioned the assembling of great mobs of rough persons and much lawlessness, which greatly facilitated the business of cut-purses and footpads who habitually haunted the Heath. But at the commencement of 1700, after much trouble on the part of the influential inhabitants, this nuisance was done away with, only, as it would appear, to make space for another—for some time previous to 1732 horse-races took place upon the upper Heath, and were largely attended.[32]

The race-course appears to have been at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle, where the surface of the Heath, so delved and broken up and caverned by the sand and gravel diggers in modern times, was then, it is said, level with North End Hill.

In July, 1736, a paragraph in the Grub Street Journal states that while the horses were being run on the Hampstead course, a gentleman, about sixty years of age, was observed hanging almost double over a gate, his head nearly touching the ground. His horse was grazing near him, and there had been no foul play; his watch and money were upon him. The dead man was a Mr. Hill, a teller in the Excise Office.

What an occasion would this incident have afforded for the fiery declamation and denunciation of the great Nonconformist preacher, George Whitfield, who three years afterwards writes in his Diary that he took his station under a tree near the horse-course at Hampstead! He was preaching there by invitation, and his audience, he tells us, were ‘some of the politer sort,’ which gave him occasion to speak to their souls of our spiritual race, and he adds, ‘most were attentive, but others mocked.’

Johnson somewhat cynically said of him that ‘he had known Whitfield at college before he became better than other people’; but he also said that ‘he believed he sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politics and ostentation, while Wesley thought only of religion.’

The races had grown to be so great a nuisance, from the crowds they drew together and the mischief that ensued, that some time subsequent to 1748 they were put down by the Court of Magistrates.[33]

Except at election times, there had never been such throngs of people or disorder on the Heath. The effect of the races had been to drive away the more refined portion of visitors to Hampstead, just at a time of year when the season was at its high-tide, and the Heath and woods and walks in their perfection.

In the spring of 1750 the people of Hampstead witnessed another instance of the spontaneity of panic-fear, which sent numbers of people to the Heath and the high grounds of the other northern suburbs to escape suffering the fate of the Metropolis, which a mad trooper (‘next to the Bishop of London’[34]) had predicted should be swallowed up by an earthquake in the April of this year. The shock of one had been felt on February 8, and again on March 8, and the proverbial fatality of the third time led to the belief that a final one would take place on April 8. When the three months were nearly accomplished, at the end of which the prophetic trooper had announced the destruction of London, this ‘frantic terror,’ writes Horace Walpole, on April 2, ‘prevails so much that within these three days seven hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner.’ Several women, he adds, ‘made themselves earthquake gowns to sit out of doors all night.’ The day passed, however, without disturbance, and, except that the unfortunate seer was sent to Bedlam, nothing came of the prediction.

That must have been a grand day on the Heath, mid-winter as it was, when, roused by Bonaparte’s threatened invasion of England (1803-4), the Hampstead Association—disbanded about a year before—joined themselves into a volunteer force, 700 strong, with the public-spirited ex-Lord Mayor of London, Josiah Boydell, as their Colonel Commandant, and Charles Holford, Esq., for their Major, and took the oath of allegiance in the face of heaven and their friends and neighbours on their own beloved Heath. They then marched to the parish church of St. John’s, where Lady Alvanley presented them with their colours.

When peace was proclaimed, these were deposited in the church, where they remained, a trophy of the patriotic spirit that had animated the men of Hampstead. In later times, when the wisdom of being always prepared for such defence made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, the Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk was converted into a drill-room for the volunteers who fell into rank in the place of their forefathers. The old colours were now borne from the church, and escorted with full military honours to the drill-room,[35] where they remained till the building was taken down, when with similar ceremony they were deposited in the new drill-hall, Heath Street.

One of the most pathetic incidents in connection with Hampstead Heath is the remembrance of Charles Lamb and his sister which Talfourd has left us, ‘mournfully crossing it hand-in-hand, and going on sadly through the quiet fields to the retreat at Finchley, where the poor sufferer sought shelter from herself ... whence, after a time, she would return in her right mind ... a gentle, amiable woman, beloved by all who knew her,’ but most of all by her brother, whose young manhood was in a measure blighted by the tragedy of which she who enacted it was wholly unconscious. He might be said to have devoted himself to her, and in life they were never parted.

Few even of their contemporaries knew the particulars of that household tragedy; the reporters of the inquest, with a respectful pity rare in their craft, withheld the names; and compassion was universally felt for the naturally inoffensive and all-unconscious perpetrator of it, and for him, the dutiful son and loving brother, whose affectionate and sensitive nature suffered in silence the double horror and the double grief. This is how the ‘Annual Register’ tells the melancholy tale (September 23, 1796):

‘On the afternoon of this day a coroner’s jury sat on the body of a lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.... While they were preparing for dinner, the young lady, in a fit of insanity, seized a case-knife from the table, and in a menacing way pursued a little girl round the room. On the eager cry of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her object, and turned with loud shrieks upon her parent. The little girl by her cries brought up the landlady, but too late—the mother was lifeless in her chair, stabbed to the heart, her daughter still wildly standing over her with the knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding from a blow on the forehead from one of the forks she was throwing distractedly about.’

A few days previously she had exhibited signs of lunacy, from which she had previously suffered, and her brother—in this lay the self-wounding sting for such a nature as Elia’s—had endeavoured on the morning of the occurrence to see Dr. Pitcairn, and had failed. ‘Had that gentleman,’ it is suggested, ‘seen her, the catastrophe might have been averted.’

What a scene for the young clerk at the India House! He was then only twenty-one, and, like his unhappy sister, working against the tide to help the straitened means of their parents. It was elicited at the inquest that no one could be more affectionate to both father and mother than the unconscious matricide, and that to the increased attentiveness which the growing infirmities of the latter required, added to the pressure of business, was to be ascribed the loss of the daughter’s reason.

Poor Lamb had himself once suffered from the same sad malady. He has been censured for sometimes yielding to drinking habits, but the memory of that one day in his life—the very threshold, rather, as it may be called—might well plead in merciful extenuation.

At times throughout her life Mary Lamb was subject to fits of mental aberration, the approach of which she was conscious of, and on these occasions would request to be taken to the abode at Finchley, where she found safety and remedial treatment.

One other event in modern times has caused widespread and painful commotion in association with Hampstead Heath, the suicide of John Sadleir, Esq., M.P. for Tipperary. I well remember the excitement on the occasion, and the rapidity with which the story was bruited about. Early in the morning of Sunday, February 17, 1856, a man was looking for a strayed donkey amongst the furze-bushes on the south side of the old watercourse (now obliterated), when he came upon the dead body of a well-dressed man. A silver cream-ewer and a small bottle lay beside him, his head resting near an old furze-clump, and his feet almost touching the water. His hat had fallen off, and his lips gave out the scent of prussic acid.

There was one extraordinary fact in connection with the case: the soles of the dress-boots on the feet of the corpse were unsoiled, though the night had been stormy and the neighbourhood of the watercourse damp at all times of the year. It was evident he must have alighted from a vehicle very near the spot, which was some distance down the bank, at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle. I have not the report of the inquest to refer to, but the details of the event made a deep impression on me, and the more so for the mystery surrounding it. I think no cabman came forward or could be found to give an account of a midnight fare to Hampstead Heath, and it was midnight or after when his butler heard him leave the house. The dress and general appearance were identical with those of Mr. Sadleir, director of the Tipperary Bank (which he had founded) and chairman of several railways and banking and mining companies; and if any doubt had existed, there was found on the corpse a slip of paper, on which, in a hand as bold as his proceedings had been, and infinitely clearer, was written, ‘John Sadleir, Gloucester Square, Hyde Park.’ Many knew the handwriting, and though some of the witnesses observed the great alteration death had made in the countenance, Mr. Wakeley, the coroner, lifted the eyelids of the dead man, and, having known him personally, pronounced them the eyes of John Sadleir. At first it was surmised that insanity from a brain overworked had led to the fatal act, but it soon became apparent that, to avoid the public scandal and degradation consequent on his own bad acts, he had voluntarily rushed out of life.

‘By his scheming and forgeries, the issue of false balance-sheets, the overissue of railway shares, the pledging of false securities and obligations, he had deprived widows, single women, army and navy officers on half-pay, and others equally helpless and unwary, of all they possessed. The victims of his iniquitous and gigantic frauds were to be counted by thousands, from shareholders to the poorest depositors, till at last, hemmed round by an inextricable network of multitudinous crime, and seeing no means of escape from the near crisis of discovery, he had stolen by a perilous short-cut out of sight and hearing of the cries and curses of those who had trusted him, to find oblivion in a suicide’s grave.’[36]

There were many who firmly believed his apparent death a forgery also, and long afterwards reports were current that he had been met with in America, whither his brother, the manager of the Tipperary Bank, had absconded. It is certain that a large sum of money which John Sadleir had received only on the day previous to the discovery of the dead body on Hampstead Heath was not forthcoming, nor was its disappearance in any way accounted for.

It appears singular why, having possessed himself of the poison, and knowing its almost instantaneous effect, he should have left his home, and gone out into the wild, dark night and distant solitude of Hampstead Heath, to perpetrate the despairing sin of self-murder. Perhaps the wretched man was goaded by the scorpion-stings of conscience to affinities closer to the condition of his mind than the conventional and ill-gotten luxuries around him. The cold damp earth, the sharp furze spines, the buffeting winds, the all-aloneness—save for the ghosts of lost opportunities, of great talents turned to infernal uses, of high respect and honours thrown away—seemed more in sympathy with the fierce frenzy, the unutterable horror, of his unmasked soul. Assuredly, no more terrible proof could be required that ‘sooner or later sin is its own avenger,’ than the suicide of John Sadleir.

CHAPTER II.
THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD.

The oldest maps of London extant show two roads to Hampstead; Aggas’s (time of Elizabeth) has four. The most easterly of these roads ran out by Gray’s Inn Lane, past old St. Pancras and Battle Bridge, through Kentish Town and part of Holloway to Highgate, touching Caen Wood, and so by Bishop’s Wood and Wild Wood Corner to Hampstead. Later on a branch of this same Gray’s Inn or Battle Bridge Road ran off by St. Pancras a little to the west, into a country lane running up from Tottenham Court Road, into what is now the Hampstead Road, and so to Hampstead.[37]

Another road ran out by Tyburn, crossing the road to Reading—the present Edgware Road—and going on by Lisson Grove to Kilburn Abbey, passing West End and Sutcup Hill, Hampstead, and thence on to Edgworth. But the most interesting of these roads, and which is distinctly traced in Aggas’s map, ran up from Charing Cross, through St. Martin’s Lane to Broad St. Giles’s, crossing the ‘Waye to Uxbridge’ (Oxford Street), and thence up Tottenham Court Road, which shows how nearly the modern highway follows the lines of the ancient one. It looks very like the present road to Hampstead, except that it appears to stop short at the top of Tottenham Court Road. The difference is in the road itself and its surroundings—running as it did over a track, which, once made, was left to take care of itself; dangerous with heaps of refuse and hollow places that in winter were full of water, and at other times absolute sloughs. Even in Charles II.’s time, when turnpike roads were made by Act of Parliament, the travelling by coach or waggon does not appear to have been much improved. The highways were in places so narrow that a lady traveller in 1764 tells us that, meeting another coach, her conveyance was brought to a standstill till the road was made sufficiently wide at that particular part to allow of the carriages passing each other. In winter and in rainy seasons, owing to the want of a proper knowledge of draining, it was not an unknown grievance for the waters in low-lying places to inundate the carriages; while at the close of such periods travellers frequently found their wheels so deeply embedded in the mud left in these hollows that they had to remain there till additional horses could be had from the nearest farmhouse or village to drag their vehicle out. The private letters, diaries, and memoirs of those bygone years are full of such adventures.

It was not, indeed, till after the first decade of George III.’s time that this state of things began to be seriously remedied, and roads, in our present meaning of the term, laid through the length and breadth of the land. Pretty deep in the present century, except for a few cottages in the fields, there were no habitations between the George Inn, Hampstead Road, and the Load of Hay, on Haverstock Hill. In other ways, the road continued to be pretty much the same as in Colonel Esmond’s time, ‘hedgerows and fields and gardens’ all the way up to Hampstead. About the time of the building of Camden Town, people who loved pure country air began to move further out, and toy villas and rustic residences dotted the Hampstead Road, some of them remaining there with their paled-in gardens and trellised porches and verandas, oddly wedged in between builders’ yards and other commercial premises, till long after I knew the neighbourhood.

As recently as 1859 the road to Hampstead was a charming one, especially if one drove there; for then you had the advantage of seeing beyond and above the pedestrian. No sooner did you cross the Canal Bridge than your pleasure in the prospects began. Leaving Chalk Farm on the left, where in some one or other of the effaced fields Tom Moore and Jeffrey (afterwards Lord Jeffrey) met to fight their intercepted duel, and Primrose or Barrow Hill, in a ditch on the south side of which (1678) the body of the murdered Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was found, ‘his sword thrust through him, but no blood upon his clothes or about him, his shoes clean, his money in his pocket, his rings upon his fingers, but with his breast all bruises, and his neck broken’;[38] and upon the summit of which, with sublimated vision, William Blake, pictor ignotus, saw the spiritual sun, ‘not like a golden disc the size of a guinea, but like an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying “Holy, holy, holy!”’

Then Haverstock Hill, with the Load of Hay tavern, looking in 1845 as rustic and simple as its name. It had been famous for its tea-gardens, and an ancient footpath from the Lower Heath, Hampstead, formerly crossed the fields from Pond Street, and came out beside it on the main road. Above the bank, rising from the highway on the left, stood the cottage, ‘famous,’ as Carey in his ‘Book of the Roads’ (1812) called it, as the residence of Sir Richard Steele, the ‘solitude’ that for so many years reminded readers of the literary Captain’s delightful essays, and recalled in his company all the wits of Queen Anne’s time, who, on their way to the summer meetings of the Kit-Cat Club at the Upper Flask, Hampstead, were wont to beguile him from unfinished copy, an easy task, since the gay instincts of the man on these occasions would generally override the severity of the philosopher, and prevent the personal application of the moralities he so charmingly discoursed about.

Hampstead from Primrose Hill.

‘I am in a solitude,’ he wrote to Pope, June 1, 1712, ‘an house between Hampstead and London, in which Sir Charles Sedley died, breathing his last,’ he adds, ‘in this very room,’ a circumstance that, in connection with his enforced rusticity, and the circumstances that induced it, combined to waken serious reflections; and writing on this occasion, as Pope himself was said to write, ‘with his reputation in his hand,’ Sir Richard somewhat ungenerously, when we consider the close kinship of many of Sedley’s inclinations with his own, improved the occasion at the dead man’s expense, wholly ignoring the assurance of gossiping Anthony à Wood that poor Sedley, after suffering much for his offences, took up and grew serious, and subsequently became a leading man in the House of Commons. If this be true, it says a good deal for the recuperative moral force concentrated in Sir Charles’s nature. Steele’s cottage stood so nearly opposite to the little hostel, the Load of Hay, that its inhabitants, if so minded, could have almost distinguished the features of the gentlemen of the road who, towards sunset, occasionally drew bridle beside the horse-block in front of the well-worn steps leading into it, to refresh themselves with a tankard of ripe ale, or some more potent stirrup-cup, before starting across country to Brown’s Well, or Finchley Common, places which continued till quite modern times to be words of fear in the vocabulary of travellers.

Pope’s contributions to the Spectator led in 1712 to Steele’s making his acquaintance, which was followed by his introducing the young poet to his courtly friend Addison. One can fancy the fine presence and handsome countenance of the distinguished essayist, his Sir Charles Grandison air, and the stately suavity of his bow, which brings the side-locks of his voluminous wig an arm’s length beyond the shapely hand laid impressively on the breast of his deep-flapped waistcoat, and the ill-dressed, crooked figure and sallow face of the youthful poet. But remembering that Pope at seventeen years of age had been admitted to the company of the wits at Wills’s, it is probable that the stately compliments of the great moralist, whose mission it was to help reform the morals and manners of the day, did not so much affect him as they might have done an older man less conscious of his acknowledged power; and the nervous flushing of the sallow cheek, the brightening of the large dark eyes, and the slight quiver of the sensitive muscles of the melancholy mouth, may be as much the result of infelt pride as of modesty.

Sir Richard Steele.

It was Addison who, on reading the first two cantos of the ‘Rape of the Lock,’ pronounced it ‘a delicious little thing’; ‘it was merum sal,’ he said, but when Pope resolved to recast the whole poem, and asked Addison’s advice, and the latter entreated him not to run the risk of spoiling it, in doing so he affronted the morbidly jaundiced mind of the poet, who, on the altered poem proving a success, called Addison’s counsel insidious, and accused the amiable giver of it of baseness.[39]

It is a pleasant recollection not only to have seen Steele’s cottage, but to have stood with my friend, Eliza Meteyard, in the room to the right where some of those witty, playful, clever papers were composed, in which the follies and vices of the times are mirrored with graphic power in the pages of the now too rarely read Spectator and Guardian.

To
My Lov’d Tutour Dʳ. Ellis

With Secret impulse thus do Streams return

To that Capacious Ocean whence they’re born:

Oh Would but Fortune come wᵗʰ. bounty fraught

Proportion’d to yᵉ mind wᶜʰ. thou hast taught!.

Till then let these unpolish’d leaves impart

The Humble Offering of a Gratefull Heart.

Richᵈ: Steele

There might have been an ampler number of them, perhaps, but for the proximity of the Upper Flask and Bull and Bush taverns, and the near neighbourhood of the Wells. But it is still pleasant to fancy the lifting of the gate-latch, and to see in imagination going up the garden-path, or issuing from it, with Steele in the midst of them, Arbuthnot and Gay and Pope, and it may be Swift, famous associates and friends, whose almost centuries-old footsteps—for those who care to look beneath the surface of the present—underlie the dust upon the hillside, and give the road a charm beyond its own.

Their pungent repartees, their brilliant fancies and clever witticisms, those mental coruscations of the moment, may yet be floating airily in space, but the more solid portions of their intellectual riches have become national endowments, and their harvest result is with us yet.

The commonplace row of mean shops called Steele’s Terrace marks the place where Steele’s double-fronted cottage stood, elevated some 15 feet above the roadway, with a large strip of garden ground before it, but solitary even when I was accustomed to see it, no other house being close to it.

Nichols, quoted by Park, alluding to Steele’s disappearance from town to this ‘solitude’ at Hampstead, writes, ‘It is to be feared that there were too many pecuniary reasons for this temporary retirement,’ a supposition generally adopted by Sir Richard’s biographers. I venture to think that another cause existed more pressing than the importunities of creditors or the exigencies of straitened means. Exactly one month after Steele’s letter to Pope, describing his whereabouts, Swift, writing to Mrs. Dingley from the old Court suburb, under the date of July 1, 1712, tells her ‘Steele was arrested the other day for making a lottery directly against an Act of Parliament; he is now under prosecution, but they think it will be dropped out of pity. I believe he will very soon lose his employment, for he has been mighty impertinent of late in his Spectators, and I will never offer a word on his behalf.’[40]

Feeling himself disgraced, and desirous of keeping out of the way of his town acquaintances, seems a more cogent reason for his seclusion than the fear of his creditors, especially when we learn that the Spectator, instead of falling off in popularity, was selling better than ever and at double its original price; and that at the close of this summer he had taken a house for his wife in Bloomsbury Square, which does not look as if he was in want of funds.

As for the irritable Dean, who had threatened to do nothing for him, a little further on in his ‘Correspondence’ he is telling the same lady of all he had done for the Whigs, and adds that he had ‘kept Steele in his place.’[41]

Leaving Steele’s cottage, we pass England’s Lane on the left—a lane famous for its blackberry hedges and the pleasant fields in the neighbourhood of the late Mr. Bell the publisher’s house; but all has changed, and the once rural lane is now a path between brick walls and garden fences. Farther on is Park Road, leading to the newly-made Fleet Road and Gospel Oak Station; and on the other side of the way, a little further on, Upper Park Road, with fragrant nursery-grounds spreading over the same distance on the right, reminiscent of the times when it was all ‘flowers and gardens’ on that side of the way to Hampstead. The road is still attractive with its handsome houses, standing behind well-grown trees in well-kept gardens; but formerly, on the ascent of Haverstock Hill, the outside passenger by the old stage-coach on looking back found himself repaid on a clear day by a brief prospect of the great city, with ‘the dome of St. Paul’s in the air,’ and all the surrounding spires, towers, and cupolas that ascend above the city roofs.

We leave Haverstock Terrace (now Belsize Grove), leading to Belsize Gardens, on the left, and a little above it, to the right, the sloping grass-fields—as yet unbuilt on, but marked for speculation—and a pleasant view, between the poplars shading the top of Haverstock Hill, of green Highgate, and the smooth mound of Traitors’ Hill west, with Camden Town crowding up to the new Cattle Market, and tiers of houses covering what were once Copenhagen Fields, an engraving of which, dated 1782, lies before me, and shows these fields with only one habitation in them, Copenhagen House, a tea-drinking place, the popularity of which extended for a considerable time into the present century.

The entrance to the garden is through the ribs of a whale set up archwise, with an inscription across the top. Two individuals are playing at bowls, whilst two others look on. In the foreground are three gentlemen in cocked hats, long-skirted coats, and their hair en queue, one of whom placidly smokes a churchwarden; while at a little distance, watching them, are two sinister-looking men, with thick bludgeons in their hands, and the ugly head of a horse-pistol ominously protruding from the pocket of one of them, suggestive of a state of society to which again I shall presently refer.

Meanwhile, Belsize Avenue dips down on the left, and a little further on the opposite side of the road Rosslyn House, once the home of the clever but unscrupulous Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn, who began life as ‘plain Mr. Wedderburne, a Scotch lawyer,’ and lived to be Lord Chancellor of England.

But the Wedderburnes, though poor, were well descended, and it is said that backstairs influence was not spared to second his own unblushing efforts for position. Lord Campbell tells us he was the first to deny the right of the poor, ‘which old usage and the piety of our forefathers had given them, to glean in the cornfields after the harvest.’ He gave judgment also that the law of burning women alive for the crime of coining should not be mitigated to hanging, and on the occasion of the Gordon Riots showed himself merciless as another Jeffreys in taking life, condemning the rioters to be hanged by scores without reference to age or degree of culpability.[42]

Rosslyn House.

He hanged mere children, for some of these unfortunates were not more than fourteen years of age, of whom Selwyn, who never missed an execution or a death at which he could be present, noted in his ‘Diary’ that he ‘never saw boys cry so much in his life.’

But to return to Rosslyn House and Lord Loughborough, we read that in politics he was without honour, siding with either party that happened to be in power, and whether Whig or Tory it mattered not—his lordship was always on the winning side. ‘None are all evil,’ but ‘neither wit, nor talent, nor a splendid hospitality’ can redeem the meaner and darker traits of Lord Loughborough’s character.[43]

Rosslyn House, formerly known as Shelford Lodge, had anciently belonged to the Careys, who held it of the Church of Westminster. It is stated in the ‘Northern Heights of London’ that the celebrated Lord Chesterfield lived here for some years, while he held the Manor of Belsize, of which it is a part, and this author suggests that his ancestors might have called the house after their estate, Shelford Manor, in Nottinghamshire.[44]

In 1812 Rosslyn House was occupied by Mrs. Milligan, widow of the projector of the West India Docks. It has since been the residence of Admiral Disney, the Earl of Galloway, Sir Francis Freeling (Secretary of the General Post Office), and others, till it fell into the hands of a speculative builder, who happened to fail before all the fine timber was felled and the house wholly destroyed. The grand avenue of chestnut-trees, which is said to be as old as Elizabeth’s time, remained almost entire[45] (1855-56), and some well-timbered fields appeared in the vicinity of the mansion. But the park itself has been cut up into portions, each of which belongs to a separate proprietor, and as many houses are scattered over it.

For four years, while the fine old house, the historical home of the unfortunate Sir Harry Vane, was being prepared for them, Rosslyn House was used as the Home for Soldiers’ Daughters.

A little farther on a bit of sward crops out, reminiscent of Hampstead Green, where Collins the painter once lived, and on one side of which still stands the house formerly occupied by Sir Rowland Hill,[46] the inaugurator of cheap postage, and that of Sir Francis Palgrave, a well-known writer and Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, 1838.

The central space is now occupied by St. Stephen’s Church, a structure nominally built by public subscription, but which, I have been told, owed its completion to the munificence of one family, old inhabitants of Hampstead, that of Prance. They gave the clock, and subsequently the carillon.

Some ancient elm-trees of magnificent size are left standing near the church. At the east end of the building two paths branch out of the main road, one leading to Pond Street and South End Green, the other to the Home of the Sisters of Providence and the congeries of sheds which, used as a small-pox hospital, desecrated this charming neighbourhood in 1870-72, and in 1886 were converted into a temporary asylum for idiots. The ground they occupy appears to be devoted to unseemly uses, a proposition having subsequently been made to convert it to the purpose of a cemetery, and this with the knowledge of the deteriorated value of property in the locality, which the closing of the small-pox hospital had not then readjusted.[47]

On the left lies Belsize Lane, and immediately past the church to the right the road leading to Pond Street, with Belsize Grove and Lyndhurst Road opposite.

Amongst the many notable men associated with Hampstead, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, K.C.B., must not be overlooked. ‘My earliest recollections,’ he writes, ‘are of Rosslyn Lodge, an old-fashioned two-storied house, in the then quiet and charming suburban village of Hampstead.’ Rosslyn Lodge stood in the grove opposite Pond Street, facing some shady fields which led on towards the town, about a quarter of a mile distant.

At the top of the grove, which consisted of fine old Spanish chestnut-trees, stood the residence of Lord Galloway (Rosslyn House), and a path led up to the Conduit Fields. These extracts from his ‘Life’ decide the whereabouts of Sir Arthur’s boyhood’s home, which one writer, at least, has placed at Frognal.

Fields near Pond Street, 1840.

At this point Rosslyn Street opens straight ahead, dominated by the ugly tower of Trinity Presbyterian Church, and a little beyond Pond Street, on the same side of the way, a new bit of road marked ‘Hampstead Gardens’ affords another charming view of Highgate. To the right Downshire Hill leads to the lower Heath and North London railway-station, with Thurlow Road to the left, and a little further on the same side of the way the lane leading to the Conduit Fields and Shepherd’s Well, which till quite modern times supplied Hampstead with water, employing a body of local water-carriers, who made a living by vending tall pails full to the householders at a penny a pail. The last of these old water-carriers died an inmate of the workhouse at New End about 1868.

Shepherd’s Well.

The road becomes steeper at the entrance of Rosslyn Street, where one looks in vain for the old ‘Chicken House,’ which Brewer describes ‘near the entrance of the village, an ancient domestic dwelling of low proportions built of brick,’ in all probability the home of the wood-reeve or keeper, and not, as local tradition persisted in believing it, a royal hunting-lodge.[48]

In 1815 it was in a state of dilapidation, the front disfigured by the presence of some miserable tenements, and in 1866 was so built in, blocked up, and divided, that, with the exception of the wide oaken staircase projecting into a yard at the end of the narrow alley—about the sixth house to the right in Rosslyn Street—no part of the original structure remained. Up these stairs on the night of August 25, 1619, passed James I. and his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, an event commemorated by two small portraits of the monarch and his Master of the Hounds, preserved till late in the eighteenth century in the window of an upper room in the Chicken House, with another painting of the infant Christ in the arms of Simeon. Under the former was inscribed: ‘Icy dans cette chambre couche nostre Roy Jacques premier de nom, le 25th Aoust 1619’—a legend sufficient in itself to show that the incident was an unusual one.

Here Mr. Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, whose attachment to Hampstead is said to have ‘amounted to a passion,’ was in the habit of taking up his summer quarters. Towards the latter years of the eighteenth century it was a favourite lodging-house for young gentlemen from the Inns of Law, the Toupees, and other sprightly youths of fashion, who affected Hampstead for the facilities the horse-course afforded of exhibiting their talents as curricle and hackney-coach drivers.

Gale, the antiquary, also lodged here, and on one occasion commissioned Signore Grisoni to make a drawing of the picturesque old church, an entry of which is preserved in the Trust Book.[49]

In 1754 Gale returned to the Chicken House, where he died. He was buried in the old churchyard. To the left of Rosslyn Hill, a little removed from the road, at the commencement of the bank, which shows the depth to which the hill has been cut down, stands the large red-brick mansion, occupying the site, and in part formed of, Vane House, a staircase of which is preserved.[50] It is now the Home for Soldiers’ Daughters, which was formally opened for their habitation by the Royal Consort, Prince Albert, on a summer’s day of 1860. A little beyond, on the same side of the way, is Green Hill, where, on the site of the late eminent publisher’s house (William Longman, Esq.[51]), stands the new Wesleyan Chapel, and, divided from it by Prince Arthur’s Road, Stanfield House, which preserves in its name that of the well-known marine painter, Clarkson Stanfield, who for some years resided here, never tired of tending his pretty garden, which has almost entirely disappeared. It is now the Institute and Public Library.

Vane House, 1800.

On the right are Rosslyn Hill Schools and Trinity Presbyterian Church.[52] It was formerly called Red Lion Hill. The original site of the small secluded chapel, in which Rochemont Barbauld officiated from 1785 to 1799, now underlies in part the present Unitarian Chapel schoolroom.