XII
COCKFOSTERS
A weird place-name, prominent upon the signposts along the road, irresistibly invites to a further exploration. “To Cockfosters,” says the signposts. Certainly, by all means. You cannot choose but go to see what manner of place this may be; but after all—as in countless other instances—nothing so very remarkable meets the explorer’s gaze. It is, in fact, a little woodland hamlet on the borders of the three parishes of Hadley, East Barnet, and Enfield; and the name, in the lack of any actual evidence, is presumed to derive from the ancient French phrase, Bicoque forestière, a little settlement amid unenclosed forest land.
MONKEN HADLEY
More meets the eye at Monken Hadley, a village not yet overwhelmed by the suburban tide. The centre of local interest is, of course, as usual, in the church, and the interest of the church itself is centred on the tower.
The date of the tall tower is readily fixed by the quaint arabic figures over the doorway, which, deciphered, give the year 1494. But the great curiosity of Monken Hadley church is, of course, the fire-pot, or beacon, which arouses such speculation on the part of strangers at a distance.
THE FIRE-POT, MONKEN HADLEY.
How far back such a beacon existed on this, or any earlier, tower-turret here must remain uncertain; but its purpose is plain enough. The light of it was intended to guide travellers benighted in the once dense and far-spreading Enfield Chase. The elevated site of the church itself was known as “Beacon Hill” in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and even then had long borne that name. There is evidence that the beacon was lighted in the troubled times of 1745, when the Scottish rebels were hourly expected to descend upon London and replace King George with a Stuart sovereign. Blown down in the great gale of January 1st, 1779, the existing one is, of course, merely a restoration. It was lighted on the night of the rejoicings over the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and again at the Coronation of Edward the Seventh.
The Battle of Barnet, in which Monken Hadley and all the surrounding district were involved, is an oft-told tale, and romantic novelists have long had their way with it. Lord Lytton was probably the last, as he was certainly the greatest, to make that great contest of 1471 the vehicle for a story; and he wrote of it so convincingly that an ancient and weatherbeaten fragment of a huge oak tree marking the border of Enfield Chase is pointed out as a legitimate historic landmark of that great contest. It is the “gaunt and leafless tree” whereon Friar Bungay hangs his hated rival, Adam Warner, whilst at its foot lay the lifeless form of his daughter Sibyll and “the shattered fragments of the mechanical ‘eureka’ on which he had spent the labours of his life.”