[Picture: The Embankment and Old Battersea Bridge]
In the extreme north-eastern corner as we enter Chelsea we find Hans Place, a secluded green oval, built about with old-time two-storied brick houses. In No. 25 was born in 1802 the poetess, Letitia E. Landon, known as “L. E. L.”; and at No. 22 she went to school. { 31} At the farthest south-western point of the parish, just over on the border of Fulham, stands the old house once tenanted by Nell Gwynne. At the northern end of Church Street, opposite the Jewish burial ground, is a public-house, “The Queen’s Elm,” perpetuating the memory of the tree, there standing until very lately, under which Elizabeth sought shelter from a shower, when strolling in the fields with Burleigh on one of her frequent visits to Chelsea. On the southern, the river, border of the parish, lived George Eliot; and here, at No. 4, Cheyne Walk, she died. Between these spots, marked by the memories of these four women, so far apart in time, rank, and character, how much of history and romance do we traverse!
In taking you for a stroll to-day through Old Chelsea we will not stop to puzzle over the etymology of the name; whether it came from the Saxon, _Chelchythe_, or from _Chesel_, meaning gravel, and _ea_, meaning a bank: nor trace it back to its earliest appearance in Saxon chronicles, in 745, as the Hundred of Ossulston, Middlesex. You may see, if you choose, in the British Museum, the Charter of Edward the Confessor giving the “Manor of Chelsey to the Abbot and brothers of the Ministers of the West,” by whom it was rented for four pounds yearly. But it will not add to the interest of our stroll to learn that when it was a residence of Offa, King of the Mercians, there was a “Geflit-fullic” held here; nor that they had “a contentious synod.” Nor shall we altogether partake of the joy of one Maitland, sounding for many a day up and down the river, and at last finding, on the eighteenth of September, 1732, the very ford between Chelsea and Battersea, traversed by Cæsar’s army in pursuit of the flying Britons. For several centuries after the Conquest, the names Chelcheth or Chelchith were used indifferently; in the sixteenth century it began to be written Chelsey; and it is only since about 1795 that the modern spelling has prevailed.