In 1380, Richard II., by his letters patent, dated March 2nd, granted to John Croucher, of Knightsbridge, towards the repairing of the king’s highway from London to Brentford, customs of the several vendible commodities therein mentioned (those of ecclesiastical men, and their proper goods bought for their use, excepted), to be taken at Knightsbridge and elsewhere, as he shall think expedient, for three years next ensuing. In 1382 this was renewed, and in 1386 was granted to John Croucher and Lawrence Newport. {24} But, notwithstanding this early care of the road, it does not appear to have been always followed up, for Wyatt’s men entered London, in 1554, by this road; its state materially aided in their discomfiture, and so great was the delay occasioned that the Queen’s party were able to make every preparation; and when ultimately they reached London their jaded appearance gained them the name of “draggletails.” It would appear from the extracts quoted from the St. Margaret’s accounts that the law was applied to the parish for its neglect in this respect, and in 1724 a petition was presented to the House of Commons, praying for an Act to remedy the evil. Twelve years later, when the Court had resided at Kensington for nearly fifty years, we find Lord Hervey writing to his mother that, “the road between this place (Kensington) and London is grown so infamously bad, that we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us there is between them and us a great impassable gulf of mud. There are two roads through the park, but the new one is so convex, and the old one so concave, that by this extreme of faults they agree in the common one of being, _like the high road_, _impassable_.” {25} Mud and dust did not, however, form the greatest unpleasantnesses of the road. In the Kensington register of burials there is an entry telling of its terrible condition:— 25th November, 1687. Thomas Ridge, of Portsmouth, who was killed by thieves, almost at Knightsbridge. And Lady Cowper, in her diary quoted by Lord Campbell, {26} writes, in October, 1715, “I was at Kensington, where I intended to stay as long as the camp was in Hyde-park, _the roads being so secure by it_, that we might come from London at _any time of the night without danger_, which I did very often.”