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The General Elections for Middlesex appear to have always taken place on Hampstead Heath. I read that at one of these meetings of the Middlesex freemen on the top of Hampstead Hill,[31] 1695, Admiral Lord Edward Russell made his appearance before the assembled voters, and was returned without opposition.

These meetings occasioned the assembling of great mobs of rough persons and much lawlessness, which greatly facilitated the business of cut-purses and footpads who habitually haunted the Heath. But at the commencement of 1700, after much trouble on the part of the influential inhabitants, this nuisance was done away with, only, as it would appear, to make space for another—for some time previous to 1732 horse-races took place upon the upper Heath, and were largely attended.[32]

The race-course appears to have been at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle, where the surface of the Heath, so delved and broken up and caverned by the sand and gravel diggers in modern times, was then, it is said, level with North End Hill.