The earliest record of any definite facts concerning this locality dates from the year 960 A.D., when St. Dunstan, zealous to establish monasteries under the strict rule of the Benedictine Order, received a grant of land from the Saxon King Edgar for the purpose of forming a religious house at Westminster. The Charter conferring this grant clearly defined the area allotted to the monastery, the boundary on the west being the course of the river Tyburn, traced from the Thames to the Via Trinobantia—the military way of the Romans from their fortified settlement on the Thames to the coast of the Solent. Later, this part of the Roman highway out of London became known as Tyburn Road, and to-day is Oxford Street. The original name of London was almost the same as it is to-day. Londinium is described by the earliest historian Tacitus, on the right bank of the Thames, forty years before Christ. A little Roman colony—a very rude affair, and yet advanced enough to have a bath in almost every house—was all there was of London two thousand years ago, and this was on the site of the still ruder huts of the Trinobantes, whose name was perpetuated by the Romans in linking up their colonies in their newly acquired possession. [Illustration: Map of Westminster, showing the course of the Tyburn, and the Western boundary of the land granted by King Edgar to Dunstan. _From Map of London in Archælogia._] The Tyburn—it is spelt indifferently Tyburn, Ty-burne, Tibourne, and in other ways—was a very little stream to figure so largely in history. Surely no rivulet of its size has borne a name more feared or written about, unless it be the Styx itself. From the northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate the waters drained off into many brooks. Of these the most important was Tyburn, which ran from Hampstead across the district now known as Regent’s Park to Tyburn Road, which it crossed somewhere near Stratford Place. Thence the stream made its way through the modern Brook Street, Hay Hill, Lansdowne Gardens, Half Moon Street, and along the valley in Piccadilly, where it was crossed by a bridge. How few of us realise what a hill there is in Piccadilly, or that a bridge over a stream there could ever have been necessary. When Piccadilly is full of traffic the steep dip is scarcely noticeable, but at night, when the lamps are lighted, one discovers by the ups and downs in the rows of twinkling lights that there is a veritable hill and vale, along which some of the most famous clubs in London are now built. In the Green Park the Tyburn widened into a large pond, from which it ran past the spot where Buckingham Palace now stands, and fell into the Thames in three branches, the main stream emptying itself at Chelsea. The burn spread into a marsh as it neared the river, and finally surrounded the wooded Thorney, or Isle of Thorns, on which Westminster Abbey was built.