William Fitz-Stephen

A Description of the City of London, newly translated from the Latin original

c.1180. B. White, 1772.

On the north are corn-fields, pastures, and delightful meadows, intermixed with pleasant streams, on which stands many a mill¹, whose clack is so grateful to the ear. Beyond them an immense forest² extends itself, beautified with woods and groves, and full of the lairs and coverts of beasts and game, stags, bucks, boars, and wild bulls. The fields abovementioned are by no means hungry gravel or barren sands, but may vie with the fertile plains of Asia, as capable of producing the most luxuriant crops, and filling the barns of the hinds and farmers.

1. Hence Turnmill Brook, which ran under Holbourne Bridge.
2. The forest of Middlesex, which was not deforested till A 1218, in the reign of King Henry the Third

Regent's Park and Primrose Hill were still part of the Forest of Middlesex when this description of London, a century after the Norman Invasion, was written. The author was Thomas Becket's chaplain, and had witnessed the murder of the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. He subsequently wrote a Life of Becket, and this Description formed the introduction to it. His translator, Samuel Pegge the elder, conjectures that the work was written between 1170 and 1182.