Trent
House, or sometimes Trent Place, was the property of John Cumming, Esq.
in the early nineteenth century. The physician Sir Richard Jebb had
built the house, whose five-hundred-acre, pale-fenced park he stocked
with deer. Enfield Chase (or Park) is an extensive district lying to
the north-west of the town of Enfield.
In
the centre of Enfield Chase (or Chace) lay the ruins of an ancient house
said to have belonged to the Earls of Essex. Until the mid-seventeenth
century Enfield Chase was largely woodland full of deer, but during
the Civil War and thereafter the park was stripped of most of the deer
and woodland and much of the land let out for private farms. After the
restoration it was again re-forested and stocked with deer, but, by
act of parliament in 1779 was again deforested and a large section of
the park was later sold, in eight lots, into private hands.
