The ancient manor of Hendon belonged at the time of the Conquest to the abbots of Westminster, but changed hands many times between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. The old manor-house (replaced first by an Elizabethan mansion and later by the present Hendon Place, built about 1850) was sometimes occupied by the ecclesiastical owners, and in it, as the guest of the reigning abbot of Westminster, Cardinal Wolsey rested in Holy Week 1530 on his way from Richmond to York after his fall. In 1757 the manor-house was sold by the Earl of Powis, to whose family it had long belonged, to the actor David Garrick, since whose death it has changed hands more than once. The various rivulets that unite to form the Brent take their rise in Hendon parish, and within its bounds is the beautiful open space, three hundred and fifty acres in extent, known as the Wyldes, a name that probably means the lonely or the unenclosed, that was for more than four centuries the property of Eton College, to which it was given in 1449 by the founder, Henry VI. Part of this fine estate has recently been bought for the public and added to Hampstead Heath, and the remainder, if the necessary funds can be collected, is to be acquired for the formation of a garden suburb, which, if it is ever laid out according to the present plans, will be an ideal addition to the attractions of the northern heights of London. The ancient home farm of the Wyldes is still standing on the edge of Hampstead Heath, but it remains a private residence, and is not included in the scheme of purchase. {41} Its fine barns and outhouses have been thrown into one house, the red-tiled roofs and weather-boarded walls of which present very much the same appearance that they did several centuries ago, and the quaint old homestead, long known as Collin's Farm, but now renamed the Wyldes, has long been a favourite haunt of artists and authors. In it the painter John Linnell and his family resided for a long time, receiving amongst their many guests Constable, Morland, and Blake; and when they removed to London in 1827 their rooms were occupied successively by Samuel Lever, Charles Dickens, and Birket Foster. Ford Madox Brown, Edward Carpenter, the Russian author Stepniak, and Olive Schreiner were often at the Wyldes; and the whole neighbourhood of Hendon was dear to Mrs. Alfred Scott Gatty, the authoress of _Parables from Nature_, who spent much of her girlhood at the vicarage.