Stand on the summit today and the ground falls away south towards Regent's Park in one continuous sweep of grass. For most of the sixteenth century there was no built edge anywhere along that line, and the whole prospect belonged to a landscape of deer, timber and royal privilege. How much of it Henry VIII actually owned is a more interesting question than the guidebooks usually allow.
Marylebone Park and the king's chase
In the Middle Ages the ground that is now Regent's Park lay within the manor of Tyburn, which had been acquired by Barking Abbey. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s Henry VIII took it into royal hands and set it aside as a hunting and forestry park, known from the neighbouring village as Marylebone Park. The Royal Parks put the area seized at some 554 acres, and describe a ditch and rampart thrown up around it to keep the deer in and the poachers out. It was thickly wooded — a surviving fragment of the old forest of Middlesex — and it was full of deer. The park remained in royal hands, used for hunting rather than farming, until the middle of the seventeenth century.
Was the hill inside it?
Primrose Hill rises immediately north of that ground, and it is very often described as having formed part of the same great chase. The claim is repeated by The Royal Parks and by nearly every popular account of the area, and it is easy enough to picture: there was no boundary of houses or roads between the two, and a hunting party could ride up from the wooded park onto the open hill without crossing anything but grass. Some accounts go further and have the king himself hunting across the slope.
The deeds tell a more careful story, and it is worth setting the two side by side rather than choosing between them.
Eton's Chalcots
The hill lay in the southern portion of the Chalcots estate, in the parish of Hampstead. Henry VI endowed his new foundation at Eton with the property of the hospital of St James in 1448, and according to the Victoria County History Eton College held Chalcots from 1449. When Henry VIII — who wanted the hospital's site for himself, on the ground that became St James's Palace — exchanged property with the college in 1531, the same source records that Chalcots was expressly reserved to Eton. The college kept it for another three centuries and did not give up the hill until 1842.
So the hill sat at the edge of the king's hunting landscape, visually and physically continuous with it, while the paperwork placed it in the hands of a school. Both things can be true at once: a chase is a place where hunting rights are exercised, not necessarily a block of land in single ownership. But anyone told firmly that Henry VIII owned Primrose Hill should know that the surviving record says otherwise.
Farms, felling and the end of the chase
Royal hunting north of London did not outlive the seventeenth century. From 1649 Marylebone Park was let out as smallholdings for hay and dairy produce, and The Royal Parks record that something in the order of 16,000 trees were felled during the Commonwealth years to raise money after the Civil War. For the next century and a half the whole district — park and hill together — was farmland supplying a growing city with milk and fodder. A handful of trees are said to have survived from the ancient Middlesex forest into the nineteenth century, but the deer had long gone.
What the hunting ground left behind
Physically, almost nothing. There is no visible pale, no ditch, no lodge. The name itself is old — Primrose Hill is recorded by the late sixteenth century, and is usually explained by the flowers that grew on its slopes rather than by any person or family.
The real inheritance is an absence. Because the hill remained in one large ownership for four hundred years, rather than being broken up into small fields and freeholds, it was still a single unbuilt parcel of ground in the 1830s, when the question of open space for London's population became urgent. Streets that grew up piecemeal never get that chance. The Tudor century gave the hill nothing you can point at — but it gave it the one condition that made everything afterwards possible.