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The uncleared ground above this settlement rose irregularly to the Heath, with great woods stretching dense and gloomy west, north, south, and east of it, and in places impinging on the sandy skirts of the Heath, originally the upheaved crust of an old sea-bottom, 100 feet deep, but then a waste of wild vert, on a surface of clay, sand, and gravel. These woods, or, rather, the great Forest of Middlesex, extended for centuries later on the east to Enfield Chace, and went crowding on in serried masses westward to the Chiltern Hills. All the surroundings were heavy with timbered shade, and hazardous from the wild beasts lurking there: wolves, boars, stags, and wild-bulls of the indigenous breed only just become extinct in the Craven district—a whole forest region, in fact, instinct with game.

Fitzstephen, the monk whose charming description of the country on the north-west of London reads like a prose idyll, tells us that in these woods were many yew-trees, and Camden, that the forest ‘was full of that weed of England, the oak,’ whilst the mast, or fruit of the beech, as we have seen, made part of the value of the manor in Domesday Book. Evelyn and W. J. Hooker assure us that in these woods grew the hornbeam, elm, and other indigenous sylva.