The Skirts of the Great City

by N. D'Anvers

CHAPTER IV

HAINAULT FOREST, WOOLWICH, AND OTHER
EASTERN SUBURBS OF LONDON

Hainault Forest

The once beautiful district known as Hainault Forest, said to have been named after the wife of Edward III., extending on the north to Theydon Bois, on the west to Leytonstone, on the east to Havering-atte-Bower, and on the south to Aldborough Hatch, belonged in early Norman times to Barking Abbey, and passed, at the dissolution of the monasteries, to the Crown. It was almost as favourite a resort of the Tudors and Stuarts as Epping Forest itself, and is nearly as full of interesting historic associations, but for all that it was condemned in the middle of the nineteenth century as unprofitable waste ground, and in 1851 an Act of Parliament was passed empowering the Government to destroy or remove the deer that had for so many centuries haunted its recesses, to cut down the trees, and to sell the land for farming or building. All too rapidly the work of destruction proceeded, but fortunately, before it was completed, it was finally arrested on the initiative of Mr. North Buxton, whose efforts to save the little remnant left were seconded by the London County Council and various local corporations, with the result that, in 1906, eight hundred acres were bought and secured to the public as a recreation ground. It was of course too late to restore to the forest anything of its ancient charm, for its dense groves of oak and beech were gone for ever, but some few delightful woodlands still remained. Many trees have been planted, and even now certain outlying villages retain something of their original rural character, especially Aldborough Hatch, the name of which signifies an ancient mansion near a hatch or gate of the forest—that has now, however, receded far from it—and Barking Side. The latter, once a secluded spot in a densely wooded neighbourhood, is celebrated as having been near the scene of the famous Fairlop Fair, that was founded in the eighteenth century by Daniel Day, a wealthy blockmaker of Wapping, and for more than two centuries was frequented every year by thousands of pleasure-seekers from the east end of London. The fair took its name from a wide-spreading oak about a mile from the still standing Maypole Inn, beneath which Daniel Day used to entertain his tenants at midsummer; but it was celebrated long before his time. Many allusions are made to it in the contemporary press, notably in the once popular Fairlop Fair song, in which its nickname is explained in the following quaint rhyme—

'To Hainault Forest Queen Anne she did ride,
And beheld the beautiful oak by her side;
And after viewing it from the bottom to the top,
She said to her court: "It is a Fair lop."'

Long after the death of Daniel Day, which took place in 1769, the blockmakers of London used to hold an annual beanfeast beneath the Fairlop oak, going to it, it is said, in a vehicle shaped like a boat, drawn by six horses; and although the tree was blown down in 1820, and its site is now enclosed in a private garden, many merrymakers still resort to Barking Side to be present at a kind of parody of the ancient fair. The trunk of the oak was used to make the pulpit of Wanstead Church and that of St. Pancras in Euston Road, and the fact that its memory was still held dear long after its fall is proved by its name having been given to the boat presented by the London Foresters to the Lifeboat Society in 1865.

Havering-atte-Bower

Although, as from Hainault Forest itself, much of the glamour and romance of the past has for ever departed from the once beautiful country, between it and the Thames, that is now a mere suburb, and not a very interesting suburb of London, some few of its hamlets and villages still bear the impress of the long ago, and are intimately associated with important episodes of English history. Near to the still independent market town of Romford, for instance, is the village of Havering-atte-Bower, that gives its name to the ancient Liberty, including the extensive parishes of Romford, Havering, and Hornchurch, and is built on the site of a royal palace, once the favourite resort of Edward the Confessor, and of many of his successors. The name of Havering has been very variously explained, the most poetic and also the most probable interpretation being that it commemorates a beautiful legend relating to the saintly founder of Westminster Abbey to the effect that he gave to St. John the Evangelist, who had appeared to him in the guise of a pilgrim, a ring from his own finger. Many years afterwards, when King Edward was at the consecration of a church in Essex, two pilgrims from the Holy Land came to him to tell him that the beloved disciple had met them in Jerusalem, and charged them with a message for him. The king at once inquired 'Have ye the ring?'—a sentence that was later converted into Havering—to which the pilgrims replied by producing it. The message was to the effect that St. John would meet the original owner of the ring in Paradise a fortnight later, a prophecy that was fulfilled, for King Edward passed away at that time. Some say the church in which the singular meeting took place was at Waltham, others that it was a chapel on the site of the present church of Romford, dedicated to St. Edward the Confessor and St. Mary the Virgin, whilst yet others think it was that which stood where now rises the modern church of St. John the Evangelist at Havering, which contains a font used in the Saxon building that preceded it.

The manor of Havering has remained Crown property to the present day, though the park in which the Confessor's house stood has been cut up and let on leases. The so-called royal palace, that was probably merely a hunting lodge, was replaced after the Conquest by a more convenient residence, called the Bower, to which the English kings were fond of resorting. There Edward III., a disappointed and disillusioned man, spent several months of the last year of his life, after he had named the unworthy son of the beloved Black Prince his successor, and there Edward IV., a year before his death, won great popularity with the citizens of London by the hospitality he showed to the 'maire and aldermen,' as related in Hall's Chronicle, who observes, 'No one thyng in many daies gatte him either more hartes or more hertie favour amongst the comon people.' Edward VI. was often at the Bower before he came to the throne; Queen Elizabeth, to whom the people of Havering were devoted, for she secured to them many of their ancient privileges, was as fond of it as of any of her palaces at Enfield, and her successor James I., never failed to visit it once a year. After his time, however, it, for some unexplained reason fell into disrepute, and was allowed to become a complete ruin. By the middle of the nineteenth century not a trace of it remained, and it is now represented by a new Bower House, a short distance from its site, built in 1729 for a private lease-holder.