The Fields Beneath (9 page)

During this event (referred to by Woodehouse as ‘the great rebellion, now happily settled by our glorious King William’) the Commons at one point heard a rumour that King Charles I and his army were marching upon London:

This was one of the lowest points in the history of Norden’s ‘poor Pancras’, already a lone surviving building in a deserted site whose village had moved away from it. It is not surprising that Woodehouse, writing half a century later, should add ‘the Church is but dimly lighted and has but a very forlorn appearance … divine service is now seldom performed in it.’ The surprising thing is that, despite being semi-derelict for so long and despite the building of New St Pancras Church in the Euston Road in the early nineteenth century, the old church did survive and is there today, one of the oldest buildings in London, when so much else has gone.

Perhaps one of the ‘dreadful deeds and crimes’ Woodehouse had in mind was the event which is recorded in a contemporary (1643) pamphlet found bound up with his MS Book, and entitled with the brevity typical of the period: ‘A Most Certain, Strange and true Discovery of a Witch, Being taken by some of the Parliamentary Forces as she was standing on a small planck board and sayling on it over the River of Pancrasse. Together with the strange and true manner of her death, with the propheticall words and speeches she used at the same time’.

This curious document provides an interesting example of the subsidiary violences which are committed in wartime on the pretext of patriotic and moral motives: it is no coincidence that persecution for witchcraft in England reached its peak in the mid-1640s. It also serves as a contrast with another account of ‘witchcraft’ by the same river from Woodehouse sixty years later (quoted in the next chapter). The change in the educated person’s view of witchcraft between the time of the Commonwealth and the accession of Queen Anne is a striking witness to the general growth in sophistication and the social change that mark the Restoration era.

The pamphlet starts with a preamble against women, citing their feebleness of mind etc. and expressing surprise that the devil should choose such weak vessels to carry out his works. It continues:

On taking a closer look the soldiers realized

When she landed, the commander of the soldiers ordered her to be brought to him:

When a carbine was held to her chest the bullet rebounded, and a sword proved equally ineffectual.

With her last breath, she prophesied that the Earl of Essex ‘shall be fortunate and win the field, and said no more … They immediately discharged a pistoll underneath her eare at which she straight sunk down and dyed, leaving her legacy a detested carcasse to the wormes. Here soule we ought not to judge of, though the evils of here wicked life and death can scape no censure.’

The account ends here. Was she, one wonders, a local girl and thus known to all the parish? Even by the standards of a country at war with itself, the soldiers’ summary execution of her went against all law and precedent. What story, one wonders, is really concealed behind the tall tale and sanctimoniously approving words? Perhaps an attempted gang rape by the idling soldiers who, having been repulsed and having killed their victim in their annoyance, then felt they must concoct a suitable story to explain away her corpse?

At all events the little-habited area near the church was evidently maintaining its character as a place of ill-repute from which respectable citizens should be warned away. Twenty years later, shortly after the Restoration, it was the scene of a long-famous murder, that of the actor Clun. He had a house in Kentish Town village to which he was returning on horseback one summer night in 1664 after appearing in
The Alchemist
at the King’s Theatre. As Pepys records it in his diary, the actor was set upon by footpads and, though he struggled a great deal, was bound and stabbed and bled to death in a ditch where his body was found the next morning. Pepys, with his usual inquisitiveness, went to view the scene of the crime several days later, and also learnt from London gossip that Clun had been sitting drinking with his mistress in town before going home, which was why he was riding back so late. One at least of those who set on him, an Irishman, was quickly taken, and later hung on a gibbet near the scene of the crime, by the roadside near St Pancras manor house. The presence of a rotting body in chains can hardly have improved the amenity of that already decayed neighbourhood. The gibbet remained there long after, as a warning to others tempted to similar crimes.

It will be noticed that what the unlucky Clun was doing was commuting. He worked in the centre of London but, despite having a mistress there, returned to Kentish Town apparently every night where he had a wife and children. This was a relatively new concept in 1664, and may point to some improvement in the condition of the roads since the beginning of the century, when mainly retired persons had taken houses in Kentish Town. Pepys himself found the place convenient enough for brief drives to take the air.

It was to be another three hundred years before the word ‘commuter’ became an accepted part of the English language. Yet the act itself was, in the course of the next century, to become a major feature of Kentish Town life.

London was growing. It had been, in fact, for some time. The first strenuous attempts to limit its size were made by Elizabeth I in a famous proclamation of 1580, forbidding the erection of any new house within three miles of the City gates – she and her Parliament could, of course, do little about the existing houses, already snaking their way down the Strand, linking London with Westminster, covering the Moor Fields to the north, working their way towards Wapping in the east. In any case neither the proclamation nor the successive Acts of Parliament that followed it seem to have achieved much. It has been estimated that the population of London more than quadrupled during the queen's reign, but that by the end of it only one quarter lived actually within the City walls. The rest (about 170,000) lived in the outskirts.

Regulations were repeatedly ignored or circumnavigated. In 1603 we find Stowe writing, of a lane to the north of the City,

Stowe's particular complaint was that many of these ‘garden houses' were built ‘Not so much for use or profite, as for shewe and pleasure' – what one might call the country cottage or
résidence secondaire
syndrome that seems inevitably to affect a society's ecology in a time of prosperity. Further proclamations during the reign of James I, setting arbitrary limits on development close to London (limits ranging from two miles to seven) were made and continued to be ignored. It was becoming evident that cities have a hydra-headed life of their own. A poem written in 1614 by Thomas Freeman, called
London's Progresse
, declared that:

It may be noted in passing that the abortive attempts at total restriction embodied the ‘Green Belt' principle, which was only to become a semi-reality some 350 years of unimaginable growth later. There was nothing wrong with the principle. But no one seems to have faced then, or for centuries, the fact that you cannot have both an uncrowded city and an uncluttered surrounding countryside. Unlike most Continental cities, London ceased, after the middle ages, to feel the need to gird herself within defensive walls. In addition, the English tendency, at all social levels, to prefer a separate house for each family and to consider this the ‘right' and healthy way to live, has been all along a perfect recipe for urban or rather
sub
urban sprawl. Thus the famous prophecy of Mother Shipton, a Yorkshire wise-woman of the time of Henry VII, was already, by the seventeenth century, acquiring a new and sinister meaning:

(In fact Highgate Hill, despite the vast development to the north of it, still does not really stand ‘in the midst of London', for the open spaces of Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill offer it some protection and an air of vestigial rurality. Descending Highgate West Hill, going into Kentish Town and therefore
towards
London, even today there is still a clear view to be had out over the green slopes of an apparently agricultural landscape – Parliament Hill – in between, much as there must have been in the eighteenth century. The building of a pub called the Mother Shipton in west Kentish Town around 1850 must have seemed, at the time, a cynical endorsement of the prophesy, but, as things turned out, the march of bricks just north of there was stayed – largely by the endeavour of private individuals.)

Charles I continued the attempts to restrict London's growth, though then, as always, it was not the new houses of the rich which were objected to but the higgledy-piggledy developments of the less well-to-do. Cromwell went on in the same vein, even introducing retrospective punitive fines for houses illegally built since 1620, but his laws about building proved as effective and workable as his laws against fornication. The regulations were renewed at the Restoration to even less effect, particularly as the Great Fire of London in 1666 brought the whole design of London into open question anyway. Many and grandiose were the schemes put forward for London's rebuilding on entirely new and rational lines, and all, like the County of London Plan of 1944, came to nothing in the end. One of them, by Sir William Petty, even embodied the idea of a ‘Greater London', a modern megalopolis in a setting of rural amenity that would one day have five or even ten million inhabitants. In his pre-figuring of the Garden Suburb ideal he was, in his way, as visionary as he was famous for his rationality, and seems to have perceived, as none of his contemporaries did, that since London was going to go on growing, it would be better to plan for this than to attempt vain restrictions. However, his views found little support; the City was rebuilt, not on the same style but to the same street pattern, and the suburbs continued their unplanned expansion. (Petty reckoned that London would eventually spread to the Essex coast, to Hitchin in Hertfordshire, almost to Reading in the west, and to Lewes, Sussex, in the south. Two hundred and fifty years later, this very nearly came to pass.)

If anything, the Great Fire probably contributed to the sprawl beyond the walls. It is recorded that afterwards homeless Londoners came and camped in those ever-accessible fields around St Pancras church, and possibly some of them stayed for good in the neighbourhood. In the years following the Plague and the Fire many new names appear in the court rolls. It was then too that Woodehouse came to occupy his ‘nearly ruined Mansion of by-gone date', and Randolph Yarwood, a notorious vicar, makes his appearance in those years. He seems to have been a man of decided opinions, and his term of office was marked by chronic quarrels with his vestry. He complained, firstly, that money intended for the poor was being used for other matters (perhaps this included some of the charitable bequests made by parishioners in Elizabeth's and James I's time?) and, secondly, that the trustees of the church lands in the parish were refusing to spend the rents from those lands either in improving his stipend or in paying the rent of a house for him to live in while a new vicarage was being built. (The old, moated vicarage near the church, constructed in the fourteenth century, seems to have been ruinous by then, and the new one was built slightly to the north of the chapel of ease, in the high road.) Yarwood took his complaints to court, and it is thought that the expenses of this litigation were the reason that, in September 1675, he was arrested on three actions for debt, and in the following year was a prisoner in the Fleet prison for a while.

Undaunted, the year after he was opposing the expenditure of the rents of the church lands on the repair of the parish church. His motive for this may not have been entirely selfish. He disapproved, he said, of the manner in which the restoration was being carried out: a gilded cross from the steeple was destroyed in the process and likewise the old screen between nave and chancel and ‘so made the Church look like a barne to this day'. (What would he have said of the light, galleried churches that the next century was to bring?) Further trouble followed; he was suspended for three years by the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's for marrying a couple without banns or licence. It is not recorded who took over the parish during this time, but the incumbent who succeeded him on his death, John Marshall, said that he celebrated some services, including marriages, at his own house, and that at other times other priests turned up at the church claiming that they had been sent expressly to marry people ‘and it was a perfect scramble who should get to perform ye office'.

The internecine war prolonged itself in 1678 with a dispute about who had the right to nominate the churchwardens: Yarwood wanted John Ives (he of the ancient family and the public house in Highgate) and claimed that the job had been given to another man with fewer votes. He seems to have won that particular round, for Ives did become churchwarden for a number of years, but, perhaps in retaliation, his opponents in the vestry locked Yarwood out of his own church. The tale is amplified by Woodehouse, who was evidently one of the pro-Yarwood faction in the parish, so the emphasis is different:

The contention surrounding Yarwood probably reflects not only the man's bizarre personality but also the sensitivity on the subject of religious observances at the period, when only a vicar of Bray could hope to stay continually on the right side of the authorities, and even then would be bound to displease some section or sections of his parishioners in whatever direction he changed course. Yarwood may have been considered by some too dangerously high-church and therefore tainted with papacy – his complaints about the loss of the gilded cross and the rood screen suggest this. Interestingly, the reputation of St Pancras church as a place where irregular things went on outlasted Yarwood's curacy. A report in a newspaper,
The Freethinker
, of 1718, represented it as a church where couples could get married at cut-price rates without a regular licence. The vicar, then and for many years, was Edward de Chair. The following year he made an attempt to let out the church-yard for grazing, but was forestalled by the vestry. Evidently he was having the same arguments with them over his stipend that his predecessor had had, but this time the vestry gave way and let him have an extra ten shillings a year.

It was clearly a difficult parish to look after, not just because of the church and the chapel on two separate sites, but because of the pressures on it, and particularly on its graveyard, from outside forces. It is plain from the sheer numbers of people listed in the marriage register under Yarwood that he must have been marrying couples who had no connection with the parish, and indeed after Marshall took over in 1690 there is a spectacular drop in the figures. But it is harder for a priest to refuse baptism or burial to outsiders, and Marshall's records for both contain many entries concerning people who were just ‘passing through' – not a few of them children who were also passing through life and that rather quickly. Winter and summer, there was a constant trickle of strangers up and down the King's Highway, mainly itinerant workers, and some of them found in St Pancras's crowded churchyard their last resting place. People like Richard Waterhouse, who ‘was a poor man that came up to haymaking. He came from Clayton in the parish of Gasting nr. Preston, in Lancs. He dyed in one of Mr Gray's houses at the Pindar of Wakefield' (a small and rather scruffy hamlet south of Battle Bridge straddling what is now Gray's Inn Road). Probably Waterhouse was old and already sick when he came south seeking work. Later the same year (1699) another, younger, casualty of haymaking was buried: Thomas Ward, ‘son of John and Mary (of Liverpool in Lancs, both lately deceased). It dyed by the way as it was carrying home by its Grandmother who had been at Harvest work in Kent, but had nothing to pay neither for the parish nor King's Duty. No King's Duty.'

At least these people, however humble their condition or brief their lives, were known by name and accorded human dignity (if only in death). Some missed even this. The nameless ‘still-born vagrant that lay in Chalcot Barn' was buried without service. The ‘unknown person that drowned himself near the Cow and Hare' might count himself lucky to be in consecrated ground at all, assuming that ‘drowned himself' is meant to be ambiguous. The ‘poor boy found dead in the fields at Tatnam Cort' was merely one of a number of children and adults that roamed these fields and sheltered in the brick kilns. Quite a number of dead children had first names but no surnames, such as ‘Elizabeth. A child taken to nurse at the White Hart in Battle Bridge. Supposed to be a bastard child but the parents unknown as also the name' and ‘Anne. It was a negro child nurst at widow Shepherd's at Tatnam Cort; the parents were slaves or servants from Barbados, Capt. Griseley Commander of an Indian Merchant ship.' Not that all the ‘nurse children' were bastards or indeed fundamentally unwanted. A large number of them appear to have been the offspring of living married parents who were, simply, working at various occupations elsewhere – for example, ‘The father is at sea, the mother keeps a publick house in Clare Street, by Clare Market.'

Other bodies that found their way to the graveyard belonged to people who had recently been in other parishes but had died in the St Pancras area, usually in one of several houses that seem to have made a business of taking in the ailing and those in throes of infancy, childbirth or age. But what strikes one particularly is the number of persons being interred who came from London, and are often plainly listed as belonging to such-and-such a parish. Many came from ‘St Giles Church End', the overcrowded area round St Giles-in-the-Fields – by then in the fields no longer. What had happened was what, 150 years later, was to happen to St Pancras church itself (see Chapter 7): the graveyards belonging to the town churches were rapidly filling to saturation point and had no room to expand. People had begun to use St Pancras churchyard as a more convenient and suitable place for burial beyond the confines of the town. Thus both the dead and the living spilt out from London proper into the still-rural villages.