The Fields Beneath
Page 7
Exactly where these houses were, it is now usually impossible to say. Someone, no doubt, lived in Bruges’s mansion: Woodehouse, a later occupant of the house, says that Queen Elizabeth granted it to Sir Roger Chomondley or Chomley, who founded and endowed Highgate School, but the Chomondleys, like the Cornwallises with whom they intermarried, are more likely to have lived in Highgate, always the smartest end of the parish. More often than not, at this period, the occupant of a house was not its owner. Another member of the family, Sir Hugh Chomondley, who died in 1601, owned a house in the Green Street area, but, again it is not known whether he occupied it himself. Woodehouse lists six substantial local landowners for the Elizabethan period, in addition to the manors.
Kentish Town was also, by reason of its nearness to town, a favoured hunting district. Game laws, intended to preserve game as far north as Hampstead and Highgate, had been in force since Henry VIII’s day. Machon’s diary records that a hunt by the Lord Mayor, that started in Holborn Fields, ended with a fox being killed by St Pancras church. There was a hunting lodge in Fig Lane (Crowndale Road) near the church, and the Castle Tavern is thought to have been another. Local tradition had it that this had been, like Tottenhall Manor, ‘a palace of King John’, but, as a nineteenth-century antiquary remarked, popular tradition habitually assigns old buildings either to the Devil or to King John (his representative on earth?) and there seems to be no reason for placing the origins of this building so far back in time. When the house was demolished in 1849, to be replaced by the present Castle public house, the Illustrated London News reproduced pictures of it, inside and out, which suggest a typical Elizabethan or early Jacobean house.
There was another house of much the same style a little to the north of it, and there must have been others again of which no traces survived into the era of watercolourists and engravers. One, built on part of the Deaconsfield, which had once been owned by Bruges and later by the Ive family, stood between Swain’s Lane and the Bull and Last – in the Green Street area. It was probably built by John Draper, citizen and brewer of London, whose family did very well for themselves in Elizabethan times. Later an eighteenth-century house occupied the same plot – Bateman’s Folly.
What was happening in Kentish Town in the Elizabethan era was happening all over England. With new prosperity, villages were being rebuilt, and the new homes were not the old scrap-wood and mud erections which a couple of generations of wind and rain would reduce to ruin again, but were built with good, new oak timbers. The new middle class, many of them for the first time rentiers living on the proceeds of property, built on a comfortable domestic scale very different from Bruges’s great hall and thick stone walls. In other parts of the country many of the houses built at this time are standing today, and a number of those built in Kentish Town could be standing today if they had not been pulled down in the mid-nineteenth century by businessmen who did not realise they were destroying a potential treasure trove (to put the matter at its lowest). Forty years after the old house had been destroyed, the Castle Inn was done over with such olde-worlde additions as a historical picture in coloured tiles. But you would have thought that someone earlier in the century would have seen which way the wind was blowing, for even as Tudor and Stuart buildings were being demolished up and down the country in favour of Victorian stock brick, Gothic architecture was coming back into fashion. Timbered Clerkenwell was demolished at the very time that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were converting the middle ages into high fashion. The destruction was carried out in the name of commercial necessity, but it didn’t, in the end, even make commercial good sense.
Among those lost by 1860 was Sir Thomas Hewett’s house. I have already said that it has been wrongly labelled as – variously or together – Cantelowes Manor House and Bruges’s house. It may, of course, have occupied the site of an older mansion, but in itself it was unmistakably a house of the period of which I am writing – a substantial gabled place in a mixture of rendered brick or stone and half-timbering of c. 1600. It seems to have captured the local imagination like no other building. J. F. King, the early nineteenth-century artist of Kentish Town, of whom we shall be hearing again, provides still further myths concerning it:
Its early history is not correctly known; some record it as being built in the reign of Henry VIII, others that it was a hunting seat of Nell Gwynn and Charles II; also that it became a Lodge belonging to the Earl of Essex where he kept his Harriers. Be that as it may, it seems to have been in times gone by a very Aristocratic residence until it fell into the possession of a wealthy farmer.
Frederick Miller (St Pancras Past and Present, 1874) supplies a different story:
A legend exists amongst the old inhabitants, that more than a hundred years ago the then-proprietor of the Old Farm House engaged a reaper at harvest time, who soon afterwards conceived the diabolical idea of murdering and robbing his new master. He succeeded in his object, but retribution speedily overtook him. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged near the spot where his crime was committed. The Old Farm House was, therefore, associated for some time with the crime and the execution of the criminal. For many years of late the premises had a deserted appearance.
‘More than a hundred years ago’ would take us back to about 1760. There is, however, no newspaper cutting of the period relating to this crime in Heal’s collection, as one might expect if the story were true. Later the house, by now in a ruinous state, was described by Albert Smith, a popular nineteenth-century novelist, in The Adventures of Mr Ledbury, as a hide-out for coiners. He evidently enjoyed himself dwelling at length on the details of its state:
… The brickwork of the walls is crumbling and disjointed, in some parts riven throughout its entire structure; the windows are mere frames of blackened and decaying wood, allowing free entrance to the interior, in mockery of the corroded padlocks still fixed to some of the doors; and the inside of the dreary building is equally dismal. The ceilings have fallen down upon the floors, and the boards themselves have rotted from the joists and lie about the apartment, sometimes standing out, like the coffin planks of a teeming burial ground, from the dirt and rubbish that half cover them …
As I have said, a popular taste for Gothic romance was well-established by the nineteenth century.
Rather earlier, probably, than Mr Smith’s word picture (which may or may not be accurate) is the testimony of A. Crosby, an amateur watercolourist of considerable talent who was familiar with the St Pancras area and painted a whole series of pictures depicting various points along the Fleet (soon to be much transformed). He also did pictures of the Castle Tavern, the Old Farm House and several other buildings. He had a particular interest in the Old Farm House, and in the late 1830s made a great many small sketches of panelling, stairs and so on, and took exhaustive measurements, with descriptions of materials used in the building. He also drew a carved mantelpiece, apparently Tudor work, from ‘Nell Gwyn’s room’. These papers now repose in a small wallet among a collection of his pictures in the Guildhall Library. Along with them is even a piece of ‘the parlour wallpaper’, which looks like a late eighteenth-century ‘Chinese’ pattern: just the thing for an aspirant gentleman farmer. It was probably laid on the walls when the Morgan family, who farmed extensively in the district, took the place over. Crosby wrote in his notes: ‘Kentish Town Old House. Mr William Morgan carried on the farming business there about 58 yrs. He left in October 1831. Held of Christ Church College Oxford. Manor of Cantlows. Ancient Moat on North and East side of House. A Walnut and Mulberry Tree in Orchard.’ He adds on another sheet: ‘The house materials are to be sold for £60.’
So much for the house of Sir Thomas Hewett, son of a Lord Mayor of London, whose own son was raised to the peerage, and whose house may or may not have sheltered the private affairs of Charles II and Nell Gwynn. The last remains of it were not swept away till 1860, when the new streets were laid out.
* This letter is quoted by Woodehouse, in his Journals.
Ordinary People
Nearly all the landscape of England and many of the houses have been created or tended by people whose very names are forgotten. The ‘history’ of an area inevitably tends to be a recital of the doings of a few literate property-owning people who left records in a comprehensible form. Those left by the ordinary, unlettered people, though ubiquitous, are far harder to read. Lanes are records, and so are farmsteads and the names of fields. Hedgerows are particularly good records, and, using Max Hooper’s rule-of-thumb that for every separate type of tree in one hedge you can count a hundred years of existence, it can be established that many still-existing hedges are seven or eight hundred years old or even older. Nor was the presence of all these species fortuitous. Hedges, now considered part of our ‘natural’ landscape, are of course planted, and men tend to plant at each era what is useful to them, so that the hedge is not just a barrier but a source of essential material. The Normans, materially ambitious and far-sighted, planted oaks near London, many of which were harvested as splendid trees about five hundred years later (and not, sadly, replaced) and went to make the ships for Elizabeth’s navy and the new, fine houses for her successful traders. Probably Hewett’s house in Kentish Town, like many others, was built with timbers from Norman trees, so that by the time it was demolished the wood in it had been in existence in one form or another for close on nine hundred years. Come to that, the best beams were not burnt even then, since Crosby tells us that the materials were sold for £60. Very possibly somewhere not far away even now some of that oak is surviving, buried in the stuccoed structure of a Victorian villa.
A century later, according to FitzStephen, St Pancras was famous for yew trees – presumably also deliberately planted or fostered, since yew was much used for making bows. Since it is poisonous to sheep, it could only be grown in an area where much enclosure took place at an early date and where the places where manorial flocks roamed free were therefore limited. (This accounts for the traditional presence of yew in a churchyard – the only piece of properly enclosed land available in many districts in strip farming days.) Land in St Pancras, lying close to London, was under all sorts of pressures and a good deal of enclosure took place centuries before The Enclosures: a map of the Totenhall manor in 1422 shows a well-established field pattern, and by the eighteenth century there was little common land left. At the same time as the yew, no doubt, ash saplings were also planted – for arrows. Blackthorn was planted for sticks and the handles of farming implements – there are some very old thorn trees among the vestigial hedge lines on Parliament Hill. Later, when wooden palings became common, chestnut was often planted for this purpose. Later again, when furniture became more plentiful and more lightly fashioned, elm was much used, and the hedgerow elms of the typical eighteenth-century enclosure landscape became ubiquitous.
These, then, were the records of generation upon generation of ordinary people, whose unrecorded, unremitting labour laid the hedges and trimmed them, just as they must also have helped to build the timber and mud houses once scattered along the high road. Their record remains in many places, and remained in Kentish Town till just over a hundred years ago. Little of it can now be found. And yet more survives, because of the extended nature of building in London, than in such typical ‘concentrated’ cities as Paris or New York. Compressed, the one behind fortifications against the Prussians and the other on an island, these two cities have between them created the twentieth-century stereotype all-urban habitat, which has been imitated around the globe. But at the same period – the mid- to late-nineteenth century – London, though expanding at an immense rate, was continuing to do so in the old haphazard fashion of towns from time immemorial: a tavern here, a gentleman’s residence there, a row of other houses there, but all quite spread out and close to the ground.
Judged by Continental standards, land use in London has traditionally been very wasteful, and still frequently is. Even today, more than 50 per cent of all the land in inner London is actually open to the sky: some of it is road space, some park or housing-estate public space, but a great deal is individual garden. From the sky, even quite densely-built areas which, at ground level and in the street present a greyly urban aspect, are a patchwork in which green predominates. The typical London street is a trompe d’oeil. The fronts of the houses, often nothing but false fronts, all stucco and pretension slapped inappropriately onto humbler brickwork, are meant to persuade you that these are grand town houses in the latinate manner, but when you walk through the house and out at the back the illusion is dispelled; irregular back-additions, cottage-like chimney stacks, sheds, betray the houses’ origins in an essentially rural tradition. Some have only paved yards, but very many have actual garden plots, with grass, roses, lilacs, flowering fruit-trees and even vegetables whose existence you would never guess at from the barren street.
It is here, at the inaccessible back of the houses, where so much of the inhabitants’ life goes on, that the pattern of the older field systems, and sometimes the hedgerows themselves, are clearly discernible. I have already mentioned the way the 1860s streets of the Christ Church Estate in Kentish Town were fitted into the existing field shapes; this is a particularly clear example, but a more fragmented preservation of hedgerows is commonplace, and often some of the actual components of the hedge survive physically. Typically, the rows of gardens behind the houses in one street end in a wall backing onto the gardens of the houses in the next, thereby creating a green enclave out of the public eye. The shared garden boundary separates the development along one street from that along another – which may indeed have been developed by a different speculator or at a different period. This boundary, then, is the historically significant one, often being much older than the line of the street itself, and it is here that surviving hedgerow trees may be found. If you take up a position (usually difficult, unless you are the tenant of one of the houses) looking along the bottom wall of a line of gardens, you may find that you are looking at a row of elms or willows, some of the trees in one set of gardens, some in another, according to the thickness of the original barrier and lie of the modern wall or fence. Elsewhere the signs of an old hedge may be more fragmentary, but a scattering of poplars or horse-chestnuts along the range of gardens may indicate its spectral presence. Very many London houses owe the substantial tree at the end of their gardens not to any great arboraphilia on the part of nineteenth-century speculators (who tended to prefer manageable privet and laurel) but to the land’s more distant incarnation as pasture, which required leafy barriers both to keep the stock in and to afford them shade and wind shelter. For the fields near London were pasture land, or land for hay, for centuries before they were ploughed up to make bricks.
The description of the St Pancras district in the Domesday Survey suggests that much of it was then ploughed; FitzStephen, a hundred years later, spoke of it being ‘as the fruitful fields of Asia … filling the barns with corn’. Clearly its main function then was to act as a granary for London: the corn was milled in the many mills of the Fleet whose sound FitzStephen found ‘grateful to the ear’ – indeed the section of the Fleet running down to Battle Bridge was known then and for several centuries as Turnmill Brook. It will be remembered also that Bruges, when he rode out to meet the Emperor Sigismund near his house in Kentish Town, knelt down to greet him in an ‘arable’ field. Up to the Elizabethan period crops were sown; Norden remarked that on this side of London:
… the soyle is excellent, fat, fertile and full of profite … Yet doth not this fruitefull soyle yeeld comfort to the wayfairing man in the winter time, by reason of the claiesh nature of soyle; which after it hath tasted the Autume flowers, waxeth both dyrtie and deepe. But unto the countrie swaine it is as a sweet and pleasant garden, in regard of his hope of future profit … The industrious and paineful husbandman will refuse a pallace, to toyle in there golden puddles.
Yet other commentators of the time suggest the swains were already discovering that,
in the vicinity of a big city, simple hay-crops (grass) can be the most profitable crop of all, and moreover one that can be harvested several times a year. An anonymous writer of the same period referred to something being ‘as plentiful as haycocks in St Pancras’, as if these were already an established fact.
In an age when all haulage and travel by land takes place by horsepower, hay, the fodder of horses, is the fuel of commerce: it is as essential a commodity as petrol is in our own times – and this is in addition to its use as food for sheep and cattle, the equally essential meat and milkproviders for the city’s inhabitants. Not surprisingly, therefore, with the growth and growing commercial sophistication of London during the Stuart period, more and more of the land adjacent was turned over to grass. The ‘clayish nature’ mentioned by Norden was in any case not ideal for agriculture. A hundred or so years later, William Woodehouse was confidently writing: ‘There is now considered to be about 3000 acres of land in the Parish [of St Pancras], only a small quantity of which is arable and the soil generally gravel and clay; the pasture and meadow land is very good and produces moderate good rental.’ He must have known, for he owned 45 acres there himself.
Looking ahead for a moment another hundred years, by 1810, when Thomas Milne drew up a detailed Land Utilisation Map of the London area, virtually all the land in the parish and in neighbouring Islington was grassland, except for a few nursery gardens and orchards. A French visitor of the same period (Louis Simond) was struck by this oddity in the environs of London, and also remarked on an obviously related fact that England was obliged to import a large quantity of its wheat and other foodstuffs from abroad – an absolute difference between England and France which remains today. A few years later, in 1822, Cobbett (of Rural Rides) remarked, with his usual asperity towards London, that the fields right out as far as Watford were nearly all turned over to hay to satisfy the needs of ‘The Wen’. It was, he said, cut several times a year by gangs of travelling Irish labourers. Perhaps local swains had by then become rather thin on the ground – or, realising that the maintenance of grassland hardly provides a full-time occupation, had turned their attention to other service industries for the spreading town, becoming coachmen, gardeners and house servants.