It’s hard to imagine Hornsey as rolling countryside dotted with little hamlets like Crouch-end, Muswell-hill and Stroud-green. Dipping into the pages of this book published in 1975 brings it so much closer. I mean, who would have imagined a face-off between Richard II and his nobles in the Great Park of Hornsey, or a necromancer trying to ‘consume’ the King’s person in a lodge in said Park in 1441. Here’s an account of how four Kings’ lives were changed in Hornsey:
Hornsey: Pages 46-78
The Environs of London: Volume 3, County of Middlesex. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1795.
Historical events relating to Hornsey-park.
¶Hornsey park is known in history as the place where the Duke of Gloucester, the Earls of Warwick, Arundel, and other nobles, assembled in a hostile manner, anno 1386, to oppose King Richard, who had given great disgust by the numerous favours which he lavished on his two favourites, Robert Duke of Ireland and the Earl of Suffolk. Their party was so powerful that the king thought it expedient to abandon his ministers.
In the year 1441, Roger Bolingbroke an astrologer, and Thomas Southwell a canon of St. Stephen’s, were taken up for a conspiracy against Henry the Sixth; when it was alleged that Bolingbroke endeavoured to consume the king’s person by necromantic art, and that Thomas Southwell said masses in the lodge at Hornsey-park over the instruments which were to be used for that purpose. This was the conspiracy in which Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester was concerned.
When the ill-fated and short-lived Edward the Fifth
was brought to London, after his father’s death, the Lord Mayor of London and 500 citizens met him in Hornsey-park, and accompanied him into the city, on the 4th of May, at the same place Henry the Seventh
was met, on his return from a victory in Scotland, and conducted into the city in like manner.
I reckon that’s a good name for a new local pub – The 4 Kings.
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