‘The first mention I find of this watercourse by the name of Fleet,’ says Maitland, quoting Stowe, ‘is in a complaint made to a Parliament held at Carlisle by Henry, Earl of Lincoln (in the above year), setting forth that the watercourse under Fleet Bridge, formerly frequented by many ships, was then, by encroachments and other obstructions, rendered unnavigable.’ And very curiously (recollecting what he has written above of the Fleet Ditch) he goes on to observe that this complaint, through great inattention, is quoted by Stowe to prove that the Fleet was then denominated the River of Wells, whereas from a charter granted by the Conqueror to the Collegiate Church of St. Martin le Grand, and also quoted by Stowe, he had shown the direct contrary in these words: ‘I do give and grant to the same Church all the land and the moor without the postern which is called Cripplegate, on either part of the postern, that is to say, from the North corner of the wall _as the River of Wells_ there near runneth, departeth the same moor from the wall, unto the running water (Wall-brook) which entereth the City.’ Moreover, the most westerly of the springs which fed the River of Wells appears to have been St. Clement’s Well, Clerkenwell, and Skinner’s Well; the others were much more to the east. But in describing the Liberty of St. Sepulchre, Maitland tells us that the street vulgarly called Turnbull Street was anciently called Turnmill Street, from the mills thereon erected by the Knights of St. John, which were wrought _by a stream of water from Hampstead and Highgate_, which, being apparently dried up, had given occasion to some to represent the same as lost, whereas, had they taken trouble to inquire, they would have found that the said stream was brought to the suburbs of London in two large wooden pipes of 7 inches bore each, the original contrivance of Sir John Hart, probably. The modern local opinion is that the Fleet had its rise about the middle of the Flask Walk, whence it ran downhill, at the back of the cottages and houses in Willow Walk,[228] to South End Green, where there used to be a pond; thence by what is now Fleet Road, through Kentish Town, to Bagnigge Wells Road,[229] the present King’s Cross Road; and so on by Farringdon Street to the Thames, debouching somewhere about Blackfriars Bridge. Undoubtedly it rose in the clay on the slope of Hampstead Hill, and, long before the Norman took _seizin_ of our shore, is mentioned in Edgar’s forged charters to the monks at Westminster of land at Paddington, of which it made the eastern boundary, that on the south being the Thames, on the north the Roman Road, and on the west the Tybourne. In maps of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, one stream—the Fleet—is seen descending from the south side of Hampstead Hill.