The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  The Ive family figure quite prominently in local records for this period, and later, in the seventeenth century, we find them still in the area. In the fifteenth century they seem to have been a troublesome and a litigious family. Because of the habit of calling sons and grandsons after fathers, it is always difficult to know which generation one is dealing with – the sparse manor court records that record rows about landholdings were kept as minutes for people who knew personally whom they referred to and had the unlettered habit of keeping all information in their heads anyway. But I assume that the Thomas Ive referred to in the 1490s was the grandson of the original one who would by then have been rather old for such activities – ‘Thomas Ive has broken and entered the pinfold of the Lord [i.e. lord of the manor] and driven away his cattle there. 12d taken for trespass and pasture.’ The following year we find him, undaunted, litigating about felled trees and obstructed watercourses. There were also debts complained against him.

  I think it was, however, the first Thomas Ive, the court official and the grandfather of the hedgebreaker, who maintained a running battle with Robert Warner or Wariner a generation earlier. This Warner, another local landowner of some substance and a member of the Grocers’ Company, was the one who, in 1440, presented to the parish the plot of land in the new centre of the village on which the chapel of ease was built (see Chapter 2). To the parishioners who came to ask him to sell that plot, he said that he had bought it only recently and that if he were to sell it again people would say he was in need of the money, so ‘for the worship of God and the welfare of the parishioners’ he preferred to give it to them. He marked out the ground himself with stakes, leaving room at the front for processions, gave £5 towards the building, though other parishioners also contributed, and apparently superintended the building himself. It is clear that Warner, whatever his legal title in the village, was playing the authoritarian and possessive role of Squire Bountiful, familiar in later centuries. Perhaps Thomas Ive did not like this and saw Warner’s handsome gesture as a threat to his own position – he who had just bought Bruges’s fine mansion for 360 marks. At any rate a struggle for precedence took place between the two families, with Ive and his lady and their servants marching in and sitting in Warner’s own pew in the chancel. Upon this, Robert Warner declared ‘it would be the worse for them all’, and took the key away from the vicar on several occasions, saying that no service should be held in the chapel while Ive was present. Thomas Ive eventually brought an action against Warner in Chancery (says Godfrey in the London Survey, Vol. XIX but he does not say how the matter was finally resolved).

  The next century brought far-reaching changes in England, with the dispossession of the monasteries, the Reformation, and finally the increasing prosperity of the Elizabethan period. Church livings, always financial assets, became delicate political commodities. In 1551, under Edward VI, the boy-king son of Henry VIII, we find Dr Ridley, then Bishop of London (later to be martyred under Mary) attempting to obtain the living of St Pancras for one or another of his protégés:

  Now there is fallen a prebend in Paul’s with the Vicarage of a poor parish in Middlesex called the prebend of Cantrells and Vicarage of St Pancras, by death of one Layton [who had been in any case dispossessed by Henry VIII]. This prebend is an honest man’s living of thirty-four pound and better and the Vicarage very small in the King’s books. I would with all my heart give them unto Master Grindall and so I should have him continually with me, and in my diocese to preach.*

  Someone else, a master William Thomas, one of the clerks to the council, was apparently after the same living. In the end Ridley gave it not to Grindall but to another protégé named in his original letter – one Bradford. But those were difficult times. Neither Grindall nor Bradford appear in the London Survey list of vicars; by 1569, when Ridley had died under Mary and Elizabeth had been queen for eleven years, the ruling authorities were for some reason taking steps to stop Grindall preaching at ‘St Pancras otherwise Kentyshetowne’ and sending him fierce notes about it.

  There is a persistent tale that St Pancras Old Church was the last parish church in England where the Catholic Mass was said, and that this was allowed to happen because there was an aged priest there who was a favourite with Queen Elizabeth. I do not know if this is true; what is true is that in 1584 a clerk, one Thomas Sherlock alias Thomas Toothdrawer – which sheds an interesting light on the money-making shifts resorted to by dispossessed priests – was arraigned for saying a private Roman Catholic Mass at Kentish Town, together with Katharine Bellamy, widow of Richard Bellamy. This probably took place not at the church but in Katharine’s own house: she had two, one at Kentish Town which had been purchased from Lord Paget, and another at Uxenden. It is clear that the Bellamys were a family of some means and distinction, whose obstinate adherence to the old faith was bound to attract official disapproval: Norden listed Richard Bellamy as a person of note in the London area. Two years later, in 1586, poor Katharine was implicated in a plot, during which a priest called Babbington was hidden in her Uxenden house. She was imprisoned in the Tower, the favourite prison for upper-class criminals, and died there. Then in 1593 her son Robert was imprisoned in Newgate for saying Mass, where he was possibly tortured and where he too died. He was fifty-two then, so seven years earlier he would have been forty-five, which argues that his mother when she went to the Tower was at least sixty-plus, and probably nearer seventy. Her property passed to her younger son Thomas.

  There were other substantial families living in Kentish Town in the late sixteenth century. Ridley’s reference to the ‘poor parish’ presumably refers to the vicar’s living rather than to the inhabitants in general. Some of their doings were chronicled by a man named Machon who lived in the district then. Of him and his diary, Heal has this to say:

  … This manuscript diary is one of the volumes which suffered severely by the fire of the Cottonean Library and is much burnt away from the upper parts of the pages. The writer was a citizen of London but of no great scholarship, some have taken him for a herald, others for a painter in the employ of Heralds. He first lived in the parish of Trinity … in the 56th year of his age he retired to Kentish Town; his diary begins in 1551 and continues to 1563. It is thought he died of the plague raging at that time.

  The life Machon depicts is a happy one: as so often with contemporary documents, there is no hint of recent strife or social upheaval. In June 1560, two years after Elizabeth ascended the throne, he reports a big wedding party at William Bellise (or Bellay’s) house, ‘the manor house of Pancrasse’. Bellise was an Alderman of the City of London and a vintner: in spite of the similarity of his name in some versions to that of the Bellamy family, it seems that they were a different family. The marriage was not apparently of a member of the Bellise family in any case, but the triple wedding of the three daughters of Atkinson, a scrivener of Kentish Town (if Machon was indeed employed by the College of Heralds, a scrivener would have been his exact social equal. There were still Atkinsons in the district a hundred years later). The three girls were married in St Pancras church wearing ‘III goodlye capes garnysshed with laces gylt and goodlye flowrs and rosemare’, and headgear with pearls and precious stones. There was a masque and mummers at the St Pancras manor house afterwards.

  Then, in September of the same year, there died one Master Richard Howlett ‘Esquire of this parish’, and he was buried in St Pancras churchyard complete with his armour. The land around the chapel of ease, which Warner had designated a hundred years earlier for church processions, was not apparently consecrated for burial though it is known that some burials did take place there, since it is recorded that, when the building was pulled down in the late eighteenth century, gravestones were salvaged and used for paving. Howlett’s funeral, however, took place properly at the church where he lay, no doubt, as Norden said, as secure against the day of resurrection as if he lay in stately Paul’s. It was the occasion for a big dinner at ‘the Howse’ (presumably, again, St Pancras man
or house). It was a meatless dinner, as befitted the solemnity of the occasion, which meant that it consisted of ‘all kindes of fyse bothe fresse and saltes’ (Did Machon actually fail in pronunciation to distinguish between ‘sh’ and ‘se’, I wonder?) and was ‘the godlyest dener that has beene in Pancrasse’. Evidently he did not know about the Bruges repast some 140 years earlier. But, as at the Bruges dinner, ‘ther was unfinished’ – to regale, no doubt, the inhabitants of humbler houses round about.

  Bequests to the poor figure prominently in the wills of the period. To local parishes, this was an important source of charitable funds: to the bequesters it was a painless way of purchasing a small stake in the Everlasting Mercy, a form of insurance premium against spending too long in purgatory. Heaven and hell being real places to most of our ancestors, the steps they took to safeguard their own future in these regions were real and practical likewise. Before the Reformation, a charitable bequest was in the nature of a formal bargain: money or goods in kind were left to the poor on condition that they would repeat Masses for the soul of the departed at regular intervals, and a sum was usually set aside specifically to defray the cost of these Masses ‘for ever’. How long is ‘for ever’? In practice, it seems to mean merely while there is anyone left alive who remembers the person – or until the next big socio-religious upheaval. Probably few of the Masses ordered ‘in perpetuity’ in the first half of the sixteenth century were still being said a generation (and a Reformation) later, but the effects of the more secular charitable bequests made after the hold of the Church was broken have proved surprisingly long-lasting.

  Typical is the generous will made by John Morant who died in 1547, setting up various charities for the poor of St Pancras including a bequest of the proceeds from twenty-eight acres of land ‘next under Haymans in the hamlet of Kentish Town’. This land lay on the eastern side of the Kentish Town high road and formed part of what eventually became Hewett’s estate and then the Christ Church Estate (see illustrations). The shape of the holding, clearly defined in the sketch map appended to the bequest, is still readily discernible three and a half centuries later on a detailed map of 1796: field boundaries are often very tenacious, outlasting buildings and even footpaths, since fields, once defined, tend to be bought, sold or bequeathed as lots, and this remains true when they are sold for building. The shape of the fields in Morant’s bequest was eventually to determine the layout of the roads in the Christ Church Estate, with Oseney Crescent fitting into a triangular patch at the end. And while the other streets – Gaisford, Caversham, Islip, Peckwater – form a regular grid pattern with their cross streets, the size of the gardens is less regular, diminishing as the field boundary tapered at one end. This is readily discernible on maps of 1870 onwards: it is less clear on the modern map because Peckwater Street was demolished after the Second World War, but still the northern boundary wall of the estate that covers that area will be found out of parallel with the next street, just as the line of the hedge was marginally at an angle to the main road centuries earlier.

  At some point in the unheavals of the sixteenth century the Church apparently lost this land. But a large parcel adjoining it on the south, which was given by a Sir John de Grey in 1315 to St Bartholomew’s Priory and Hospital, in return for the usual Masses for his soul, was still in the possession of Bart’s in the mid-nineteenth century, when streets were laid out on it bearing Bartholomew’s name.

  An even clearer persistence through time is found in the case of Heron’s Gift, consisting of £8 left in 1580 for repaving the roads of the hamlet. By 1861, when the various ‘paving boards’, an untidy legacy from the eighteenth century, were finally swallowed by the Metropolitan Board of Works, this legacy had, with investment, swollen to £41. 19s.8d.– though, taking inflation into account, this does not seem an overall gain. I owe this piece of information about Heron’s Gift to Palmer (History of St Pancras, 1870). But what Palmer does not seem to have guessed at is a possible connection between Heron’s gift in 1580 and the curious presence in the borough of some old slate paving, on which he comments: ‘One of the peculiarities of Kentish Town still preserved … It certainly bears a very clean and pleasing appearance, and very soon becomes dry, but in wet and frosty weather is dangerous in the extreme. The slabs of almost polished slate make it as difficult to walk upon as the polished oak floors of our ancient family mansions …’

  In 1582 Sir John Stonehouse ‘of Kentish Town, Knight’, whose wife had died before him, left capital represented by forty shillings to be given yearly in bread to the poor of St Pancras, to twelve poor men a frieze gown, shirt and pair of shoes and to twelve poor women of the same parish a frieze gown, shift and pair of shoes. He stated that this should be done on October 1st each year – in time for the winter chill and wet. But Woodehouse, noting this in his journal 120 years later, commented ‘No such charity now known’. Money, being flexible in use, lasts longer than more precise bequests: much more durable was Platt’s Gift, also given (in 1637) in memory of a deceased wife. It consisted of some of the revenue from lands given to St John’s College, Cambridge in what is now the north part of Kentish Town but was then a separate hamlet within St Pancras known as Green Street – £20 yearly for the poor of Kentish Town. That twenty pounds is still on offer today; notices are posted about it in the local public library. But it is not always easy to find ten modern old age pensioners who will stand up in a public meeting and ask for it.

  Equally and more profitably durable was Palmer’s Gift. Eleanor Palmer was the daughter of a cofferer of Henry VII and wife to John Palmer of Kentish Town, whom she out-lived. She seems to have been of a slightly higher social class than her husband, and the extensive copyhold lands they held in both Cantelowes and Totenhale came from her side of the family. One of their daughters married a son of Lord Paget – he who sold his house at Kentish Town to the ill-fated Lady Bellamy. When she died in 1558, Eleanor bequeathed to the poor of Kentish Town a third part of the profits of three acres of land situated near the Fortys Field (now Fortess Terrace, Fortess Road – which has nothing to do with ‘fortress’). Writing about this property in 1870, Samuel Palmer (no relation, I think) remarked that ‘In 1696 it produced £2. 10s; in 1810, £14, and now it produces £50 per annum.’ It had by then been built upon and its revenue was helping to fund some almshouses: ‘On the renewal of the lease,’ he added, ‘it will bring in a very much larger sum.’ This remark, indeed, might stand as a classic understated comment on the history of once-farm land turned into brick and mortar. Today, the revenue is the property of The Fortys Field Housing Association, a charitable trust, and part of it is occupied by a primary school, built in the late 1960s to replace an older one and called Eleanor Palmer. I hope she would be surprised and pleased if she knew.

  The most remarkable will preserved from this period and district is that made by Richard Bowdler in 1603 as he lay dying in St Pancras parish, to which he had retired. He was a member of the Society of Merchant Adventurers ‘for Muscovie and the East Indies’, a Freeman of the Drapers, and erstwhile citizen of London. He seems to have been an extremely wealthy man with property in various parishes, but he asked specifically in his will to be buried at St Pancras. He left numerous charitable bequests naming quite large sums: £60 for a dinner for the parish inhabitants and his friends, other monies for releasing ‘poor prisoners’ (perhaps debtors?) in various itemised prisons. He sounds a man of compassion and imagination, but the endless bequests, both to the poor and to his own family, become repetitive: one wonders if it was all quite realistic. He claimed to be ‘very sick in body but of good and perfect memory’, but perhaps this was not the case. His name does not seem to crop up in other local records, which one feels it should have if he was really such a substantial citizen. Unless, of course, the connection with St Pancras was merely his retirement there when already old.

  This, indeed, is a tale that many wills tell by implication. The hamlets of ‘St Pancras in the Fields’ – Kentish Town, Green Street an
d Highgate (whose inhabitants often preferred to go to church more conveniently in Hornsey) – were suitable places within easy reach of London to retire to. Well-to-do people like Lady Bellamy, Eleanor Palmer and Sir John Stonehouse bought or leased houses there in old age in the same way that their modern counterparts might retire to Gloucestershire, Sussex or Spain. Often, as with their modern counterparts, their country houses in St Pancras were not the only ones they possessed. They were rustic retreats, a sign of the new prosperity among the merchant and civil servant classes. Speaking of Middlesex in general, Norden wrote:

  This shire is plentifullie stored and as it seemeth beautified with many faire, and comely buildinges, especiallie of the Merchants of London, who have planted their houses of recreation not in the meanest places, which also they have cunningly contrived, curiously beautified, with divers devises, neatly decked with rare invencions, invironed with Orchards of sundrie delicate fruites, gardens with delectable walks, arbers, allees and great varietie of pleasing dainties …