Caen Wood (or Ken Wood, as Lord Mansfield always spelt it), lying between the villages of Hampstead and Highgate, belongs to neither, but is situated in the parish of St. Pancras, which adjoins Hampstead Heath at the upper corner of Lord Mansfield’s demesne. Part of Caen Wood comes out upon the Heath, from which it has been emparked, and the whole is so nearly connected by neighbourhood and association with the local history of Hampstead, that in writing of the one it is impossible to ignore the other. Ken Wood, a name which Loudon believed preserved the British one of Kerns, or oak-woods, with which its site was anciently covered, is thought by Lysons to be derived from that of some remote possessor, a family of the name of Kentewoode having in bygone times held land in this neighbourhood and in Kentish Town. Mr. Lloyd quite recently, in a lecture entitled ‘Caen Wood and its Associations,’ gives it as his opinion that the name comes from the French Caen; and he says that in all probability the Conqueror gave the property to a relation of his own, who, having lands at Caen in Normandy, naturally called his new estate after that town. I give this suggestion, which is very probable, for what it is worth. In the time of Charles II., I learn from Somers’ Tracts, Ken Wood was not the name of a part only, but of the whole remaining portion of the great woods belonging to the See of London, part of the old Forest of Middlesex, of which Park, with reason, imagines Ken Wood to be a remnant.[194] It is situated in the Manor of Cantleowes, in the north-east corner of the parish of St. Pancras, and ‘is a portion of one of its four great manorial properties, viz., Cantleowes, Kentish Town, St. Pancras, Somerstown, Ruggemere, Marylebone, and Tottenhall, Tottenham Court Road.’[195]