Roman way from Staines to London, which ran through Turnham Green, passed a little west of where Holland House now stands, then along Hyde Park railings to the Marble Arch, and so through Oxford Street. We should see then about twelve hundred acres of this land, some patches of it better cultivated than the rest. Some straggling vines would attract our eye, for our forefathers could not send to Spain or France for sherry and claret, but were obliged to be contented with what their own country could produce. We might perhaps observe a drove of pigs, watched over by some Saxon swineherd; for we are told by an old record that there was "pannage," or pasture, for two hundred swine.

The whole of this property was valued at £10, and even if we make allowance for the relative worth of that sum in those days, this will not seem an extraordinary value for 1,200 acres. As the whole population of Middlesex was probably little more than 10,000, the cottages in the district must have been few and far between indeed; perhaps there was one better house, belonging to that Edwin who held the Manor in the time of Edward the Confessor. If so, even it would

most likely be a low one-storey cottage, built entirely of wood, and roofed with shingles.

So much, then, or rather, so little, for Kensington at the time of the Conquest.

At that time an important change occurred. Edwin the Theign suffered the fate of most Saxon noblemen. Perhaps he had led on his countrymen at Hastings. In that case Norman William seized his land at once. Perhaps he was ousted later, after the great rebellion in 1069. Be that as it may, Doomsday Book, in 1064, tells us that Aubrey de Vere held Kensington of the Bishop of Coutances. The De Veres thus became possessors of Kensington, and held it at first indirectly, and afterwards directly, of the Crown, uutil Norman and Saxon were fused into Englishmen, until the glorious English tongue revived by Chaucer, found its fullest expression in Shakespeare; then, and not till then, did Kensington pass from the hands of the Starry Veres. They were among the noblest and proudest of the old Norman aristocracy, a family noted for loyalty, yet not unmindful of liberty. Speaking of the twentieth and last of the old Earls of Oxford, Macaulay writes:-" He derived his title, through an

uninterrupted male descent, from a time when the families of Howard and Seymour were still obscure, when the Nevilles and Percies enjoyed only a provincial celebrity, and when even the great name of Plantagenet had not yet been heard in England."

The house of Vere can boast of many names well known in the annals of our country. One De Vere as we have seen was a companion of the Norman Conqueror William, and had commanded a portion of the invading army at Hastings. The first Earl, minister to Henry I., had been ennobled by both factions during the anarchy of Stephen's reign. One of them was among the eighteen barons, the leaders in obtaining Magna Charta from John, and his statue is to be seen in the House of Lords. They fought at Crecy Poitiers, and Agincourt, in the Holy Land, and in the Civil Wars of their own country. The ninth Earl was the unfortunate favourite of Richard II., and is the first Marquis known to the British peerage.

In the wars of the Roses, they joined the unfortunate Red Rose, and helped to seat Henry VII. on the English throne.

The last Earl with whom Kensington has to do, was

Little John of Campes, so called from his residence at Castle Campes, in Cambridgeshire. On his death, in 1526, his estates were divided among his sisters, and by them and their descendants, what remained of the Veres' property in Kensington was alienated.

The defeat of the Red Rose at Barnet was, unintentionally, owing to a De Vere. John, the thirteenth Earl of Oxford, commanded the right wing of Warwick's army, and during the skirmish his badge, the star of the De Veres, being mistaken for the sun of York, he was attacked by his own party. There was a curious legend about this star; it was said to have dropped from heaven on the shield of a crusading De Vere. They had other devices too—a boar's head, a silver bottle, a chair, and an unknown object, which, to our unheraldic eye, looks very like a parish pump. Their punning motto, "Vero nihil verius," that is to say," Nothing truer than true or Vere," is as celebrated as their starry badge. It is said, however, that the name is to be traced to a very different source, and comes from the Dutch Veer, a dam. There are persons in England now of the name of Weir, who claim descent from the Earl of Oxford, so the name may have

only returned to its original signification again, after all. It seems doubtful whether the De Veres ever lived in Kensington. The site of the "ould house" there may perhaps be traced in Holland Park, and there is an Earl's Court in the neighbourhood, where they may have administered justice. In Edward the First's reign they claimed the privileges of infangthef and outfangthef, which barbarous words simply mean that if Robert de Vere, then Earl, had found someone running off with any of his goods and chattels, he could have condemned him to death, and might have strung him up to one of the highest trees that now overlook Holland Lane, had he been so inclined.

The De Veres have left few memorials in the neighbourhood, only a local name here and there. There is an Aubrey Road, named, doubtless, in honour of Kensington's first possessor, which consists of a few quiet houses, that used to have a pretty view over Holland Park, till the evil fairy, Bricks-and-mortar, came, and, with a stroke of her wand, transformed a rustic pailing and oaks and May trees into masonry and ghostly poplars. The growth of Kensington during the time of the De Veres was but slow. The