CHAPTER XIV.

_THE PONDS AND WATER-WORKS._

In the chain of ponds which make so charming a feature between Highgate and Caen Wood, or in some of them at least, we have, according to the brothers Storer,[226] all that remains visible of the river Fleet, which originally formed them. The others are as old as the time of Henry VIII., and owe their existence to the necessities of the citizens of London for a better water-supply. The ancient springs, which previous to 1544 abundantly supplied the city, had about that time ‘diminished and abated to the great discomodity of the inhabitants, and the threatened decay of the said Citie, if a speedy remedy was not provided.’ We learn that Sir William Boyer, Knight (subsequently Mayor of London), called ‘unto him dyvers grave and expert persons,’ who, by ‘diligent search and exploracion found dyvers great and plentiful springes at Hamstede Heath, and other places within five miles of London, very meet, proper, and convenient, to be brought and conveyed to the same.’ Upon which an Act was passed to empower the said Mayor and Commonalty to lay pipes, dig pits, and erect conduits in the grounds of all persons whatsoever, making satisfaction to the proprietors of the soil. Special provision being made for the protection of the springs ‘at the foot of the hyll of the sayde Heath, called Hamstede Heath, now closed in with brick for the comodity and necessary use of the inhabitants of the towne of Hamstede.’

These works were carried on in 1589-90 by Sir John Hart, and about the same time the course of the ancient river Fleet, which rose on the south slope of Hampstead Hill, and fell into the Thames at Blackfriars, being much choked and decayed, it was undertaken that by draining divers springs about Hampstead Heath into one head and course (for which £666 17s. 4d. were collected by order of the Common Council), and connecting the rivulets with Turnmill Brook, or the river of Wells[227] and the Old Bourne, which rose in a clear stream near Holborn Bar, that both the city should be served of fresh water in all places of want, and also that by such a follower (as men call it) the channel of this brook should be scoured into the river. But by continual encroachment on its banks, and casting of refuse into the stream, after much money had been spent to little purpose, the Fleet became more ‘choaken’ than before. Subsequently the springs were leased out by the City of London (1692), and the Hampstead Water Company was formed, whose office, Maitland tells us, was in his time in Denmark Street, St. Giles’s, to which belonged two main pipes of 7-inch bore, which brought water from the ponds at Highgate and Hampstead.

In a terrier of the Manor of Hampstead, taken about the end of the seventeenth century, to which Park had access, he found among the copyholds ‘the Upper Pond on the Heath, stated to contain three roods thirty perches. The Lower Pond on ditto, one acre one rood thirty-four perches.’ In Park’s time the Hampstead Water Company still supplied some parts of the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court.

As a result of this speculation, it may not be uninteresting to subjoin the following paragraph, which appeared in the _Times_ of August 4, 1859:

‘Yesterday at the Auction Mart, Mr. Marsh offered to public sale twenty-five shares in the property of this company (the Hampstead Water-Works), which was formed in 1692, having for its object to raise a capital for the supply of water from springs within the parishes of St. Pancras, Hampstead and Hornsey, the right to which had become vested in the promoters under the lease from the City of London, the lease being renewed from time to time. By an arrangement recently effected with the New River Company, the renewed lease and the property have been transferred to the New River Company for the consideration of an annuity of £3,500, payable in perpetuity by the New River Company, being at the rate of £5 16s. 6d. per share on the 600 shares of the company.’

The shares sold at from £100 to £110 per share. In 1870, when the preservation of the Heath was almost accomplished, Mr. Le Breton stated at a vestry meeting that he had been ‘to the New River Company to make out the history of these ponds, and he had heard what we have just recited, that they had formerly belonged to the Hampstead Water-Works, whose rights were bought by the New River Company. So far as they could learn, the land was still vested in the Lord of the Manor. The company had a right to the easement of the water, but not in the land. It was said there was a lease of the ponds for 999 years; the secretary of the New River Company seemed to think they only had a right to the water, and Sir John Wilson was very anxious that the ponds should remain as ornaments to the Heath’—a desire in which every lover of the picturesque must join him.

Hughson has fallen into the error of regarding Turnmill Brook, or the River of Wells, as one and the same with the Fleet, simply because, as already stated, it was ultimately included in its outlet; but a little examination and research would have shown him that at the time of the making of Domesday Book, the Fleete, the Tybourne, and the Brent, were the principal streams which carried the waters from the northern heights through the Great Forest to the Thames; and that Turnmill Brook, or the River of Wells, was, as he himself observes in another place, formed ‘by the influx of many springs in the neighbourhood,’ and not a substantive and self-supplied stream as the Fleet was. This year, he observes (1503), the ancient River of Wells (afterwards called Fleet Ditch) was cleared, and made navigable for craft as far as Holborn Bridge. Maitland also calls it ‘Fleet Dyke, now Fleet Ditch, the remains of the ancient River of Wells.’ It is all plain enough if we admit the Fleet to have lost its identity in that of the River of Wells, or Turnmill Brook, at an early stage of its set-out from Hampstead Hill.

But unless we take the word ‘Fleete’ in its general Saxon sense as a flood, or mere watercourse, how can we separate the idea of an important stream from one that presumably gave a name to so many objects and places?

It was always a troublesome stream, going wrong immediately after it got to Holborn, as early as 1307.

‘The first mention I find of this watercourse by the name of Fleet,’ says Maitland, quoting Stowe, ‘is in a complaint made to a Parliament held at Carlisle by Henry, Earl of Lincoln (in the above year), setting forth that the watercourse under Fleet Bridge, formerly frequented by many ships, was then, by encroachments and other obstructions, rendered unnavigable.’ And very curiously (recollecting what he has written above of the Fleet Ditch) he goes on to observe that this complaint, through great inattention, is quoted by Stowe to prove that the Fleet was then denominated the River of Wells, whereas from a charter granted by the Conqueror to the Collegiate Church of St. Martin le Grand, and also quoted by Stowe, he had shown the direct contrary in these words:

‘I do give and grant to the same Church all the land and the moor without the postern which is called Cripplegate, on either part of the postern, that is to say, from the North corner of the wall _as the River of Wells_ there near runneth, departeth the same moor from the wall, unto the running water (Wall-brook) which entereth the City.’

Moreover, the most westerly of the springs which fed the River of Wells appears to have been St. Clement’s Well, Clerkenwell, and Skinner’s Well; the others were much more to the east. But in describing the Liberty of St. Sepulchre, Maitland tells us that the street vulgarly called Turnbull Street was anciently called Turnmill Street, from the mills thereon erected by the Knights of St. John, which were wrought _by a stream of water from Hampstead and Highgate_, which, being apparently dried up, had given occasion to some to represent the same as lost, whereas, had they taken trouble to inquire, they would have found that the said stream was brought to the suburbs of London in two large wooden pipes of 7 inches bore each, the original contrivance of Sir John Hart, probably.

The modern local opinion is that the Fleet had its rise about the middle of the Flask Walk, whence it ran downhill, at the back of the cottages and houses in Willow Walk,[228] to South End Green, where there used to be a pond; thence by what is now Fleet Road, through Kentish Town, to Bagnigge Wells Road,[229] the present King’s Cross Road; and so on by Farringdon Street to the Thames, debouching somewhere about Blackfriars Bridge.

Undoubtedly it rose in the clay on the slope of Hampstead Hill, and, long before the Norman took _seizin_ of our shore, is mentioned in Edgar’s forged charters to the monks at Westminster of land at Paddington, of which it made the eastern boundary, that on the south being the Thames, on the north the Roman Road, and on the west the Tybourne. In maps of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, one stream—the Fleet—is seen descending from the south side of Hampstead Hill.

It is said to have been navigable as far as King’s Cross in Edward I.’s time. When the brothers Storer published their ‘History of Clerkenwell,’ in 1828, they tell us that from a point in their parochial boundary the banks of the Fleet River were seen to jut out in little wild crags, and break into miniature precipices, as it meandered originally between green slopes at the foot of the uplands, clothed with umbrageous trees.

In Crosby’s ‘Notes’ mention is made of the varying and interesting windings of the Fleet River in its course from Hampstead to the Thames. Even in his ‘Additional Notes’ (1845) he speaks of the silver Fleet meandering through and irrigating those charming meadows which reach on either side of Kentish Town to the sister hills of Hampstead and Highgate.

It was only a little later than this date that I first knew these meadows, and the dried channel of the winding stream he speaks of, the course of which might be traced by the decaying alders and old willows that fringed it through Gospel Oak fields, at the end of which it had subsided in a ditch.

It had remained navigable as far as Holborn Bridge till Henry VII.’s time, from which period the less we say of its city life the better. It had been dredged and scoured to no purpose, but after the Great Fire, much of the débris being thrown into it, it became, in Charles II.’s reign, an abomination. In Anne’s time, Gay gives us a sufficiently disagreeable description of the desecrated river, and Pope, in the ‘Dunciad,’ asserts it

‘The king of dykes, than whom no sluice of mud With deeper sable blots the silver flood.’

It was the Creek that in modern times was called Fleet Ditch. It had its entrance immediately below Bridewell, Blackfriars being to the east of it, and reached as far as Holborn Bridge, at the foot of Holborn Hill. Here it received the little river Fleet, Turnmill Brook, and the rivulet known as the Old Bourne. The latter rose at Holborn Bars (removed[230] not many years ago), and gave its name to Holborn. It lost itself, as has been said, in the Fleet at Holborn Bridge.

In 1737 Fleet Ditch was covered over, and the space gained was occupied by Fleet Market. Nearly a hundred years later (1829) this was removed, and Farringdon Street now occupies its site.

Upon the right, going towards Holborn, stood the Fleet prison for debtors, founded in the first year of Richard I. I remember its removal in 1845, and, long before I ever saw it, hearing my mother tell of the sad feelings with which she had often passed it in her youth, by reason of the melancholy implorations of certain of the prisoners, wretched-looking beings, who let down bags from the windows, and cried to the passers-by: ‘Please remember the poor debtors!’ One penny loaf per day was the gaol allowance, and those who had not friends to supply them with food to supplement this dole literally starved to death.

This was the scene of the Fleet marriages. Pennant tells how in his youth he had often been tempted by the question ‘Sir, will you please to walk in and be married?’ and he tells us that a painted sign of a male and female, hands conjoined, with the inscription ‘Marriages performed here,’ was hung on the walls of the building. A dirty fellow invited you in, and the parson, a squalid, profligate figure, ‘clad in a tattered plaid nightgown, with a fiery face,’ stood just within, ‘ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco.’ This state of things was not put an end to till 1753.

But the Fleet prison has a history of its own, and lies outside the Hampstead story of the river.

To return to the water-supply. The ponds in the valley between the sister hills, as Thomson calls the acclivities of Hampstead and Highgate, have often proved dangerous to children and others, from the sudden shelving of their banks.

Suicides, too, lured by the lonely quiet of these silent pools, have sometimes sought oblivion in them; but, as a rule, anglers and naturalists are their more persistent visitors, and they may generally be trusted. One specially dangerous is that at the back of the tavern in the Vale of Health, on which the swans make so pleasing an appearance, and children are likely to approach too near the margin in their eagerness to feed them.

The town of Hampstead, till quite recent times, was supplied from the well in Shepherd’s Fields, where a conduit had existed in very early times, the water of which is said to have been remarkably sweet and soft.

This well was mentioned in the last Act relating to the conduits in the time of Henry VIII.