Middlesex

“ It is as well we are not bound to enter the County of London, since there the Lea would bring us to Hackney Marsh, perhaps the most unlovely spot of Middlesex soil—one which some examiners, indeed, might propose to bracket with Staines Moor, that at least deserves a proxime accessit.
Such blotches, however, are exceptional, and between those dismal flats on the most distant edges of the county so recklessly libelled as “all ugly,” it has been shown how one can find much pleasant and not a little charming scenery of a truly English type. ”

“ They who are accustomed to the varied loveliness of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent, with their delightful mixture of arable, pasture, woodland, waste, and down, one shading off into the other, cannot but find the unvaried pastures and gentle hills of Middlesex and Hertfordshire wearisomely monotonous in their prevailing heavy tints and ever-recurring bounding lines ”

“ Another contrast between the two counties is in shape, Surrey being, on the whole, more compactly contained than its sprawling neighbour. But the most striking difference is that of soil, Surrey marked off in zones of clay, chalk, and sand, that give its special ornament of dimpled variety, while Middlesex shows mainly a smug face of London clay, only here and there spotted by sandy pimples, gravelly scabs, rare warts of rock, or more frequent freckles of brick earth, in most parts interlarded with the patches and cosmetics applied by elaborate culture. ”

“ She was made Mistress of the Robes: her favour soon 'grew,' as the shrewd Horace remarks, 'to be rather more than Platonic.' She lived with the royal pair constantly, and sat up till five o'clock in the morning at their suppers; and Lord Middlesex saw and submitted to all that was going on with the loyalty and patience of a Georgian courtier. Lady Middlesex was a docile politician, and on that account, retained her position probably long after she had lost her influence. ”

“ The great illustrative value of Geoffrey's charters is this. They prove, in the first place, that Middlesex (inclusive of London) was treated financially on the same footing as Essex or Herts or any other shire; and in the second they give us that all-important information, the amount of the firma for each of these counties at the close of the eleventh century. All we have to do in the case of Middlesex is to keep steadily in view its firma of £300. ”

“ Some of our most learned historians describe the “Middle Saxons” as a very small people, forming a part of the East Saxons; but they are obliged to confess that they find very little to say about them. It is believed that there never was a separate people called Middle Saxons. They have been created out of a snatched analogy, of the mere name “Middlesex,” with “Essex,” “Sussex,” and “Wessex.” There can be little doubt that Middlesex represents the original civitas, or territory, of the local government, of its urbs or burgh of London, the capital of the kingdom of Essex. ”

“ The later charter, for instance, although in the main lines following the older charter, makes no mention of Middlesex being let to ferm nor of any appointment of sheriff or justiciar being vested in the citizens. It appears as if Henry was determined to bring the citizens no less than the barons of the realm within more direct and immediate subservience to the crown. The concession made by the king's grandfather had been ignored by Stephen and the empress Matilda, each of whom in turn had granted the shrievalty of London and Middlesex to the Earl of Essex. ”

“ A winter day’s stroll would bring us through its greatest length, and at one point it might be stepped across in a couple of hours. On the other hand, its smaller area has a considerably larger population than Surrey’s, even excluding its bigger half of the Metropolitan area. But more thickly packed as it is with suburbs and villages, farms and factories, Middlesex is not so well off as Surrey for good old independent towns, and for capital has to content itself with the shabby squalor of Brentford. London seems to have cast its shadow on this side so as to stunt the growth of puny boroughs. ”

“ Kent, of all the Old English kingdoms, had probably the least room for the expansion of its people. As they increased in number, they were necessarily obliged to seek new homes and migrate. We can hardly imagine any more likely circumstance in relation to the settlement of Middlesex than that some of the surplus population on the Archbishop’s land in Kent should have been allowed to settle on his lands in Middlesex, to the advantage of both the settlers and their lord. ”

“ Among authors, only popular novelists or journalists can afford to keep gigs, not to speak of motor-cars and the like, so one need not make a virtue of necessity. But no one should presume to write a book about Middlesex without having tramped all over its hills and dales on the green lanes and winding field-paths, too many of which have been obliterated, but many are guarded more carefully than ever now that the sons of Mammon or of Nimrod would fain enclose them against the like of me. ”

“ You are going to burst on everybody to-night, you and your lovely face, and your six feet of height, and your wonderful hair, and your wonderful pearls, and the most wonderful gown that you've got. I want all London for an hour or two to be wild to know who you are, and I have told the box-attendant to take your name off the door, and not to let anybody in between the acts. Afterwards I shall take you to the dance at Alice Middlesex's, which, luckily, ever so luckily, is to-night. She is the one person I have told.”
“The Duchess of Middlesex?” asked Amelie. ”

“ It is hard for us who now know the chief town of the coast of Sussex as virtually a suburb of London, to imagine the time when Sussex, isolated in its heathen barbarism, remained virtually another world to the inhabitants of Essex and Middlesex. ”

“ In 1621 also he became lord high treasurer, and in September 1622 was created earl of Middlesex, losing his positions and influence shortly afterwards because he opposed the projected war with Spain, and had incurred the hostility of Prince Charles and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. ”

“ On the second occasion a general election was in progress, and this agitator then sought re-election to Parliament, and stood for the City of London. Defeated in the City, he issued his election address the following day as a candidate for the county of Middlesex, and was returned triumphantly at the head of the poll. “Wilkes and Liberty!” was now the popular cry, and the member for Middlesex became more than ever the darling of the mob, the idol of the populace. ”

“ At the time of the Domesday Survey the population of Middlesex, exclusive of London, was 2302. The extra-metropolitan area is 149,668 acres, with a population in 1901 of 798,738. The part of the ancient county transferred to the county of London under the Local Government Act 1888 was 31,484 acres in extent, and 771 acres were then transferred to Hertfordshire; while under the London Government Act 1899 the southern part of Hornsey was transferred to London. The area of the administrative county is 148,700 acres. The county contains six hundreds. ”

“ In this world everything is comparative. We in Middlesex may not have the warm sunshine and blue skies of France or Italy, but we have weather which admits of garden parties, and country sports, and pastimes; up in this region of mountain, rock, and river, it is perpetually blowing big guns or raining cats and dogs, and the Scotchman, as he can’t go out, must sit at home and improve his mind. ”

“ The East Saxon kingdom, Malmesbury says, comprised the modern [Pg 123] Essex, Middlesex, and half Hertfordshire. The Saxon Chronicle under 912 says: “This year died Æthered, and King Edward [Alfred’s son] took possession of London and Oxford and of all the lands which owed obedience thereto.” [135] A charter professedly dated as early as 704 names Twickenham in the province of Middlesex, but nothing is known to history of a Middle Saxon kingdom or people. Bede says London was a city of the East Saxons, and the London bishopric is coextensive with the East Saxon kingdom, including Middlesex. ”

“ The hundreds all over the country have not altered their boundaries to any great extent until quite recently. In Hampshire to-day there are thirty-seven hundreds; in Hertfordshire there are only eight; and Middlesex has now the same six hundreds which it had twelve centuries ago when a good part of the county was forest land. ”

“ Enfield does not turn its best face to the Lea Valley, but the stretch of parks and shady roads to the north of it makes one of the pleasantest corners of Middlesex. And if the pedestrian seek a green ramble back to town, I can put him upon one which will show part of the country not so much changed from the days of Lamb’s wanderings. Let him take the Barnet Road, past the Great Northern Railway station and the spired church, a little beyond which, where the road drops from a turning marked “Chase Ridings,” he looks out for a field-path going off to the left. ”

“ Though Dorset be a fool. I quote the verses as they stand, though “dunce” seems scarcely the right description to apply to Lord Middlesex, that dissolute and extravagant man of fashion, who squandered large sums of money upon producing operas, that “proud, disgusted, melancholy, solitary man,” whose conduct savoured so strongly of madness. Certain family characteristics appeared in 156him which had skipped his father, and his father and he, consequently and not unnaturally, were not on very good terms. The duke, indeed, did not know what to make of his eldest son and heir. ”

“ Middle Passage, in the slave-trade the part of the Atlantic stretching between Africa and the West Indies.
Middlesbrough (99) , iron manufacturing and shipping town at the mouth of the Tees, in the N. of Yorkshire, 45 m. N. of York; has also shipbuilding yards and chemical works, and exports coal. It owes its growth to the discovery of one of the largest iron-fields in the country in the Cleveland hills, near at hand, in 1850.
Middlesex (560) , a small county on the N. of the Thames, adjacent to and W. of London; has no hills and no rivers, only undulating pasture land and small streams. ”

“ If London is in Middlesex [702] , it is Middlesex’s one borough. In Hertfordshire is Hertford. In Buckinghamshire is Buckingham, but no aid can be expected from it. In Oxfordshire is Oxford. In Gloucestershire is Gloucester, but Winchcombe also asserts its burghal rank. In Worcestershire is Worcester, while Droitwich appears occasionally with a small gift. Hereford is the one borough of Herefordshire. Turning to the third zone, we pass rapidly through Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire; each has its borough. ”

“ Like other great commercial seaports or staples, this already great mart had maintained much of the condition of a free city; and, in passing, along with its territory from Essex to the ascendant power of Mercia, it may not have been by conquest, but by a voluntary exercise of that instinct, to unite in the fortunes of an advancing supremacy, which is often associated with, and perhaps closely allied to, commercial habits. At all events, it is at this time that the name, Middlesex, first comes to light ”

“ The original structure has been claimed as Anglo-Saxon. Some antiquarian spectacles make out here the site of a Roman camp; while there seems better reason to take this King’s burgh as the first Saxon settlement in Middlesex, in a sense the nucleus of modern London, when the place may have been more populous than it is to-day, but for its annexe Neasden. The
HENDON village of Kingsbury has drifted nearly a mile to the north, where it lies stranded about its “Green Man,” past which a by-way from Harrow leads into the Edgware Road at the hamlet called the Hyde. ”

“ The second husband being a Middlesex man, which was doubtless the reason John Harvard was entered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 19 Dec. 1627, as of ‘Midlesex.’ He graduated in 1631, and proceeded M.A. in 1635; he was now a man of meanss, as his mother had been left property by each of her three husbands. In 1637 he married Ann, the daughter of John Sadler, a Sussex clergyman, and sailed for New England. ”

“ Essex is a contraction of East-seaxe, denoting the territory occupied by the East Saxons; Sussex, of Suth-seaxe, or South Saxons; and Middlesex, of Middle-seaxe, or the inhabitants of the district between Essex and Wessex, the land of the West Saxons, which, under the Heptarchy, extended to the westward as far as Devon. Surrey is a modification of the Anglo-Saxon Suth-rey, south of the river, i.e., the Thames. ”

“ With this precedent before you, with the principles on which it was established, and with a future house of commons, perhaps less virtuous than the present, every county in England, under the auspices of the treasury, may be represented as completely as the county of Middlesex. ”

“ They hang in chains on the road to London.
'Twas revealed to a King of Scots, that if he drank of the water of Muswell, he would be cured. After great enquiry they heard of such a place, not far from Hornsey in Middlesex. See Weever's Funeral Monuments of the Well. John Norden's Description of Middlesex. Here was afterwards founded a religious house for Austin Monks: since it belonged to Sir Thomas Row, and in 1677, was pulled down and the materials sold. Anciently the Kings of Scotland were feudatory to the Kings of England, and did their homage every Christmas day. ”

“ In a ‘Visitation of Middlesex’ dated 1634 he was described as ‘of Sunbury.’ According to the same authority he had two children—a son Francis, who married a lady named Cory; and a posthumous daughter, Posthuma, who married a man named Speare. ”

“ On the upper side of the road, mounting beside the grounds of Bentley Priory, spreads Stanmore Common, a fine piece of heath and copsewood, whose knolls and hollows are the highest open ground in Middlesex. When the west end of the Common is left behind by the road, it rises gently to the highest point (503 feet) at the cross-roads, with an “Alpine Coffee House” for hospice. The milestone, some 200 yards ahead, marks the edge of Herts, in which the main road runs on to Bushey and Watford, with turns dropping to Harrow Weald and Pinner, and ways on the other side to Aldenham and Elstree. ”