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This mandate was issued just six months before the King’s death, when his physical condition must have totally incapacitated him from the sport from which he interdicted others, and this in the face of repeated charters giving the citizens of London a right of free chase in the forests of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, the Chiltern country, and Kent as far as the river Cray. This proclamation helps us in imagination to a view of the then existing condition of the north-western suburbs—fields from the back of Gray’s Inn right away to Islington, a village of ‘cakes and cream’ in the midst of meadows; the uplands of Hampstead, Highgate, and Hornsey still covered with thick woods and coverts filled with game, whilst between them and the city stretched the open country, with here a wattled hut, and there a half-timbered house; the clack of mills resonant beside the willow-shaded Fleet, which had its rise at the foot of Hampstead Hill, and went running on through Gospel Oak Fields to Kentish Town and Pancras, and thence by Holborn to its outlet in the Thames at Blackfriars, where a creek rendered it navigable to Holborn Bridge.