FOOTNOTES:
[2] Running-footmen, who attend the carriage or palanquin, go messages, carry books or letters, or any light thing they can take in their hands.
WHERE DOES LONDON END?
It is not only a well-understood fact, that the Great Metropolis is a sore puzzle to strangers, but even the dwellers therein are wont to give up, in despair, any attempt to define or limit it. What is London? There are two causes, or rather two sets of causes, which throw great doubt on the proper answer to this question. The one is the varying acreage or area comprised under this name, and the other is the natural increase of population over every part of the area. Let us shortly glance at both these groups of disturbing causes.
The original London was the nucleus of that which now constitutes the City of London. The London of the Britons before the Romans landed, is supposed to have been little other than 'a collection of huts set down on a dry spot in the midst of the marshes;' a forest nearly bounded this spot, at no great distance from the Thames; and a lake or fen existed, outside London, at or near the site now occupied by Finsbury Square. The area of London, at this early period, is supposed to have been bounded by—to use their modern designation—Tower Hill on the east, Dowgate Hill on the west, Lombard and Fenchurch Streets on the north, and of course the river on the south—a limited area, certainly, not much exceeding half a mile in length by a quarter in breadth. There are indications that brooks bounded this area on the north and west, and a marsh on the east; but there is no reason to believe that the city had walls. The terrible devastation in the time of Boadicea must have nearly destroyed London, destined to be replaced by one of Roman construction.
The Roman London was evidently of larger size. The ancient city-wall is known to have been of Roman substructure, although surmounted by work of later date. It had many turrets or towers, and seven double-gates, supposed to have been Ludgate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, Aldgate, and the Tower Postern-gate; and the streets now named from those gates will serve to mark out the included area. Roman London may be said to lie about sixteen feet below our London, over all this area; about two feet being the débris of the Roman buildings, and the rest being subsequent accumulations of rubbish, at the rate, say, of a foot in a century. In the later Saxon and Norman times, the western portion of the wall was extended so as to include a somewhat larger area, the utmost limit of 'London within the walls' being 370 acres.
But London refused to stay within its walls; it walked forth into the country; and even so far back as 1662, London, beyond these limits, was four times as large as that 'within the walls.' Of this exterior portion, 230 acres constituted the 'city without the walls,' subjected to civic jurisdiction by successive grants; it formed a belt nearly around the portion 'within' the walls. These 600 acres, less than a square mile, have ever since constituted the 'city of London,' divided into two portions—'without' and 'within' the walls. There are ninety-eight parishes in the inner portion, and eleven in the outer; but the London which lay beyond the corporate rule had no social or political bounds placed to its extension. There were the ancient city of Westminster and the village of Charing, on the west; and London marched along the Strand to meet them: there were Kensington and Bayswater in the remoter west, and Piccadilly and Oxford Street became links to join them to London: there were Killurn and Hampstead and Highgate, Newington and Hornsey and Hackney, on the north; and London has travelled along half-a-dozen great roads northward to fraternise with them. So, likewise, on the east; and so, likewise, crossing the river to the south, do we find this same process to have been active: villages and hamlets have become absorbed into London, by London going to meet them.
If we now ask, Where does London end? it will be found that this ramification perplexes the subject greatly. Who shall say that such or such a hamlet is not in London? Who is to draw the line, and where? It was said ten years ago, that the metropolis is a hundred and forty times as large as the city of London 'within the walls;' but even this is vague, unless we know where the limit is placed. One mode of grouping, adopted before the appointment of the Registrar-General of births, &c., depended on the 'London bills of mortality,' or the record of deaths preserved by the parish-clerks. London, in this sense, included the city within the walls, the city without the walls, Westminster, and about forty out-parishes. Southwark was not included in these bills originally, but became a component part afterwards. The Registrar-General, under the improved modern system, gives an immense range to London; it includes the City, Westminster, Southwark, all the out-parishes of the former system, and the villages or hamlets of Bow, Bromley, Brompton, Camberwell, Chelsea, Deptford, Fulham, Greenwich, Hammersmith, Hatcham, Kensington, Brompton, Marylebone, Paddington, Pancras, Highgate, Stoke-Newington, and Woolwich. It is true, he calls all this the 'metropolis;' but the metropolis is in common parlance identical with 'London.'