The shares sold at from £100 to £110 per share. In 1870, when the preservation of the Heath was almost accomplished, Mr. Le Breton stated at a vestry meeting that he had been ‘to the New River Company to make out the history of these ponds, and he had heard what we have just recited, that they had formerly belonged to the Hampstead Water-Works, whose rights were bought by the New River Company. So far as they could learn, the land was still vested in the Lord of the Manor. The company had a right to the easement of the water, but not in the land. It was said there was a lease of the ponds for 999 years; the secretary of the New River Company seemed to think they only had a right to the water, and Sir John Wilson was very anxious that the ponds should remain as ornaments to the Heath’—a desire in which every lover of the picturesque must join him. Hughson has fallen into the error of regarding Turnmill Brook, or the River of Wells, as one and the same with the Fleet, simply because, as already stated, it was ultimately included in its outlet; but a little examination and research would have shown him that at the time of the making of Domesday Book, the Fleete, the Tybourne, and the Brent, were the principal streams which carried the waters from the northern heights through the Great Forest to the Thames; and that Turnmill Brook, or the River of Wells, was, as he himself observes in another place, formed ‘by the influx of many springs in the neighbourhood,’ and not a substantive and self-supplied stream as the Fleet was. This year, he observes (1503), the ancient River of Wells (afterwards called Fleet Ditch) was cleared, and made navigable for craft as far as Holborn Bridge. Maitland also calls it ‘Fleet Dyke, now Fleet Ditch, the remains of the ancient River of Wells.’ It is all plain enough if we admit the Fleet to have lost its identity in that of the River of Wells, or Turnmill Brook, at an early stage of its set-out from Hampstead Hill. But unless we take the word ‘Fleete’ in its general Saxon sense as a flood, or mere watercourse, how can we separate the idea of an important stream from one that presumably gave a name to so many objects and places? It was always a troublesome stream, going wrong immediately after it got to Holborn, as early as 1307.