To write fully the history of a space so crowded with pregnant memories would be too great a task for any one pen, nor could a single book hope to hold one tithe of the interesting memories which throng these precincts; but I trust that the rapid survey given in the following pages, of some of the famous happenings and curious traditions connected with the place, may not be unwelcome to those who now adorn Hyde Park.
CHAPTER II
A ROYAL HUNTING-GROUND
Hyde Park in its present guise is essentially modern. It preserves nothing of that old-world air which makes the lawn of Hampton Court and the formal gardens of Windsor Castle so delightful.
Rotten Row as a tan ride has been laid out in the memory of people still living. The Marble Arch on its present site is Victorian. Burton’s Arch, and the screen at Hyde Park Corner, are but a little earlier. Queen Caroline, consort of George II., formed the Serpentine. Queen Anne planted avenues of stately elms. Charles I. made “The Ring,” though few now-a-days will identify the spot which for so long was the meeting-place of the fashion of the town. With all this the Park is very old, and as open land left to nature undisturbed, its history may be traced back in an unbroken record to the time when it was part of the wild forest that originally surrounded London.
The earliest record of any definite facts concerning this locality dates from the year 960 A.D., when St. Dunstan, zealous to establish monasteries under the strict rule of the Benedictine Order, received a grant of land from the Saxon King Edgar for the purpose of forming a religious house at Westminster. The Charter conferring this grant clearly defined the area allotted to the monastery, the boundary on the west being the course of the river Tyburn, traced from the Thames to the Via Trinobantia—the military way of the Romans from their fortified settlement on the Thames to the coast of the Solent. Later, this part of the Roman highway out of London became known as Tyburn Road, and to-day is Oxford Street.
The original name of London was almost the same as it is to-day. Londinium is described by the earliest historian Tacitus, on the right bank of the Thames, forty years before Christ. A little Roman colony—a very rude affair, and yet advanced enough to have a bath in almost every house—was all there was of London two thousand years ago, and this was on the site of the still ruder huts of the Trinobantes, whose name was perpetuated by the Romans in linking up their colonies in their newly acquired possession.
Map of Westminster, showing the course of the Tyburn, and the Western boundary of the land granted by King Edgar to Dunstan.
From Map of London in Archælogia.