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Shepherd’s Well.

The road becomes steeper at the entrance of Rosslyn Street, where one looks in vain for the old ‘Chicken House,’ which Brewer describes ‘near the entrance of the village, an ancient domestic dwelling of low proportions built of brick,’ in all probability the home of the wood-reeve or keeper, and not, as local tradition persisted in believing it, a royal hunting-lodge.[48]

In 1815 it was in a state of dilapidation, the front disfigured by the presence of some miserable tenements, and in 1866 was so built in, blocked up, and divided, that, with the exception of the wide oaken staircase projecting into a yard at the end of the narrow alley—about the sixth house to the right in Rosslyn Street—no part of the original structure remained. Up these stairs on the night of August 25, 1619, passed James I. and his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, an event commemorated by two small portraits of the monarch and his Master of the Hounds, preserved till late in the eighteenth century in the window of an upper room in the Chicken House, with another painting of the infant Christ in the arms of Simeon. Under the former was inscribed: ‘Icy dans cette chambre couche nostre Roy Jacques premier de nom, le 25th Aoust 1619’—a legend sufficient in itself to show that the incident was an unusual one.