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.’