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But I am forgetting, in my remembrances of the charming suburb, that from the earliest birth of a taste for natural beauty, Hampstead must have had a special interest for the inhabitants of London.

Beautiful as were the whole range of gently-swelling hills forming the background of the City, and long subsequent to Tudor times covered with dense woods, which encroached on the north and east even to its gates, and came down on the west as far as Tyburn, Hampstead Hill from its altitude, and the fact, as someone has written, that it ‘closed the gates of view in that direction,’ must have had an interest beyond the others.

Baines claims for Hampstead that it was a village before 1086; in other words, that the five manses, or homes of the villani and bordarii on the original clearing, which are mentioned as existing when Domesday Book was compiled, constituted a village. In 1410, at the time of the assignment of Hampstead, together with Hendon, to Henry Lord Scrope of Marsham for the maintenance of his servants and horses, he being then attending Parliament on the King’s service, it is included with Hendon, and styled a town (‘the towns of Hampstead and Hendon’).