On this side of the way, immediately facing Green Hill, stood Elizabeth House, an old mansion, so called, it is said, from the legend of her princely Majesty on some occasion or other having slept here. For a considerable part of the present century it was occupied as a first-class ladies’ school. Serjeant Ballantine’s sister and Constable’s daughters were pupils. It is still standing, but in disguise, having been converted into shops.
On the same side of the way is Gayton Road, a new thoroughfare, unfinished when I left the neighbourhood (1864-65). It covers the greater part of the space formerly occupied by the playground, gardens, and orchards of a once celebrated school (the house—Norway House—still stands) in the now narrow cul de sac called Burford Lane, after the name of the present proprietor, an old-fashioned, many-windowed, two-storied dwelling.
Burford Lane is close to the town entrance to the Lower Flask Walk, on the right-hand side of the High Street, and close by the Bird in Hand, the coach-office where the modern omnibus deposits its passengers, as the old stage-coach did in the days of Richardson’s Clarissa.
High Street and Heath Street are the great arteries of Hampstead, out of which issue the crowded, confused ramifications which make the study of its groves, mounts, squares, streets, terraces, lanes, and courts a topographical puzzle to the uninitiated.
The ways leading to these intricacies all start from the two principal streets, so that a stranger beginning at the beginning soon learns to unravel the difficulties of the locality for all purposes of business or pleasure. How this complicated irregularity of position and outline came about, which makes the old town unlike any other, and how, from a hill village of five wattled huts, shut in by the great Forest of Middlesex, it grew to be a place of fashionable resort, and gradually enlarged to its present extent and settled respectability, with its tens of thousands of inhabitants, claiming municipal rights, will be set forth in the following chapters.
CHAPTER III.
THE DESCENT OF THE MANOR.
From the earliest times until after the Reformation we find Hampstead an appanage of the Church. At the dissolution of the Abbey and Convent of Westminster, Henry VIII. granted the Manor of Hampstead, combined with those of North Hall and Down Barnes, in part support to the newly-made bishopric of Westminster. In 1551, two years before the death of Edward VI., they were surrendered to the Crown, and in the same year granted to Sir Thomas Wroth as a mark of the young King’s favour. This gentleman, who, ‘amongst the divers sober and learned men of the King’s privy chamber, by whose wise and learned discourse he was much profitted,’ stood highest in his estimation, and in proof of it, with boyish generosity, we find the King, who had knighted him, making him rich presents from the royal wardrobe, and bestowing on him, not only the Manor of Hampstead and the others above-mentioned, but a plurality of manors in several counties.
On the death of Edward, and accession of Mary, Sir Thomas fled to Strasburg, where he remained till the succession of Elizabeth, when he returned to England, where he was ‘received into the Queen’s favour, and employed by her in the concerns of State.’