POLITICAL HISTORY 



MIDDLESEX is bounded on the south, east, and west sides by 

 the rivers Thames, Lea, and Colne respectively. The 

 district thus formed seems to have been an uninhabited 

 borderland in British times, 1 a desolate tract round Roman 

 London, 8 and presents itself later as the portion left over when the neigh- 

 bouring counties had been colonized by the Anglo-Saxons. The three 

 rivers formed the natural boundaries to a physically unattractive country, 

 over which stretched a mass of forest in the north, a marsh in the south- 

 east, and a barren heath in the south-west. The northern boundary 

 points to a later period, to the time when manorial estates were formed. 

 The irregular outline seems to make a special effort to exclude Totteridge, 

 High and East Barnet, and Monken Hadley from Middlesex, and includes 

 South Mimms, while leaving North Mimms to Hertfordshire. This 

 irregularity is explained when we find that the entire north-eastern 

 portion of Middlesex consisted of the manors of Enfield and Edmonton, 

 including South Mimms. These large and thinly populated manors 

 stretched into the forest which was known later as Enfield Chase, until 

 they met the confines of Totteridge, an outlying portion of the bishop of 

 Ely's manor of Hatfield ; s of High and East Barnet, which belonged to 

 the abbey of St. Albans ; of Hadley and North Mimms, which were 

 given by Geoffrey de Mandeville to Walden Abbey. Friern Barnet is 

 thus cut off from the other Barnets, and lies in Middlesex, because it 

 formed part of the manor of Whetstone and belonged to the priory of 

 St. John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell.* 



It is uncertain when Middlesex was divided into hundreds. Six 

 appear in the Domesday Survey and six remain to-day, although 

 ' Houeslaw ' (Hounslow) Hundred is now called Isleworth, and a large 

 portion of Ossulstone Hundred has been included in the county of 

 London since 1888. 



London has naturally been the all-dominating factor in the political 

 history of Middlesex, although the City is not in Middlesex. We see her 

 influence in the lack of independent county history ; in the smallness of 

 the population in early times, as well as in the ever-increasing multitudes 

 of to-day ; in the absence of county nobility and gentry, as well as in the 

 unimportance of her towns. 



Little is known of the early history of Middlesex. The marshy 

 valley of the Lea, and the forest stretching northwards from the heights 



1 Guest, Orients Celticae, ii, 390, 403. 



1 Scarth, Roman Britain, 38 ; Jaunt. Arch. Inst. xxiii, 1 80. 



1 Domesday Bk. (Rec. Com.), i, 135. ' Lysons, Environs of London (17 '95), ii, zi. 



