The Fields Beneath (5 page)

In archaeological terms, then, the area round St Pancras church is a deserted mediaeval village. This has to be understood if early documentation on Kentish Town is to make sense; and when it is not, much confusion results. Admittedly the fact does not spring to the eye, mainly because the phrase itself conjures up something quite different: a bare field on which, from a low-flying aircraft or the slope of an adjacent hill, faint lumps, circles and shadows can be picked out. But this, in fact, is what you would probably have seen in the area round the old church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had you been able to achieve the right vantage point. (A balloon, perhaps?)

Dr Stukeley, the mid-eighteenth-century divine, and Kentish Town house-owner, was convinced that the area was the site of an extensive Roman camp. But Roman remains, representing classical civilisation, were more fashionable in his era than they are today, and the many centuries that separated the hypothetical Roman construction workers from the eighteenth-century antiquarians were lightly passed over. Today, were archaeologists able to trek with Dr Stukeley over the lumpy fields of St Pancras, they would no doubt be able to diagnose there a rise and fall of pre-Conquest and mediaeval buildings which the Doctor does not even seem to have suspected.

But those lumpy fields are, unfortunately, no longer there, even in concealed form, for modern archaeologists to excavate. A fundamental problem of research into the past in an overcrowded area like the south of England is that field archaeology, which is used to reveal ancient road and field patterns, strip farming patterns, house-sites and the like, can only be done over a fairly wide area at once. The chances, in any built-up area, of an archaeologist having at his disposal any more than a small fragment of a field or village site, are slight. But urban excavation, which takes a small area such as the site of one demolished building and combs it intensively, is only appropriate to centre-city sites that have been built upon for centuries and are therefore, with any luck, a rich layer-cake of successive building deposits. Forced, as an archaeologist would be in St Pancras, to use urban techniques on what was until the nineteenth century a field site, he would not discover much. Moreover the foundations, post-holes and fragments of paving which it is tempting to imagine somewhere down below the surface of the modern streets, would not even be there any longer to find. In an area that has been open country since, such remains are never more than a few feet down because there has been nothing much to pile on top of them. Virtually all the old house remains of the original Kentish Town would therefore have been scooped out and cast aside, together with the compressed evidence of former crops, when the basements of the nineteenth-century terrace houses that came to cover the area were constructed. Our deserted mediaeval village was finally dispersed into dust, and the dust scattered far and wide, when the Russell family laid out what was first optimistically known as ‘Bedford New Town’ and is now more commonly called, after its tube station, ‘the Mornington Crescent area’, or ‘that bit between Camden Town and Euston’.

This brings me to a fundamental problem for a writer who picks a particular area: not only its aspect but its very demarcation lines change as fields disappear under streets. When a place – Kentish Town or any other – is a small settlement, whether compact or straggling, and is surrounded by open country, even a quite distant field, being ancillary to the village, may be regarded as part of it. But once that field has been put to more intensive use and sown with houses instead of wheat, perception of it changes. The new ‘place’ will be given a new name, and will develop as an entity quite separate from the original hamlet. When Lord Camden was empowered, by special Act of Parliament in 1788, to grant building leases on his lands near St Pancras church, the bill was called ‘The Kentish Town Act’. Yet the new town he built there was, of course, Camden Town.

Thus the parish of St Pancras
alias
Kentish Town, which in the middle ages stretched from the top of Tottenham Court Road in the south up to Highgate in the north, is today many districts: Euston, King’s Cross, Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, part of Chalk Farm, Gospel Oak; Parliament Hill, the Dartmouth Park area and the Holly Lodge Estate – as well as the modern, reduced Kentish Town proper. What I mean by ‘Kentish Town’ must therefore, of necessity, be variable also; references are determined by what the inhabitants of any particular era thought of as Kentish Town – a large tract of land in the middle ages, a more concentrated centre with some outlying districts in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an increasingly sharply defined area in the nineteenth and twentieth.

Not only as it was built over did Kentish Town reduce in area; the reduction, in terms of the inhabitants’ own perceptions, continued as social decline set in, after the coming of the railways in the 1860s. An inhabitant writing to the historical column of a local paper
c.
1900 pointed out: ‘“Kentish Town” has ceased to be “genteel” and it has therefore become smaller and smaller.’ The various neologisms – or euphemisms – for the out-lying parts of Kentish Town, in the hundred years after about 1860, become familiar to anyone who consults local archives and local memories: Parliament Hill, Highgate Rise, Dartmouth Park, Brookfield, North St Pancras, Holloway, Camden New Town – all these were employed to avoid the use of those despoiled and shaming words ‘Kentish Town’.

Students of present-day inverse snobbery, however, may care to note that, since about the mid-1960s, the trend has been reversed. There has been a slight but distinct influx of the professional middle class into Kentish Town proper and also into the outlying quarters of Parliament Hill, Camden Square etc. The result is many of these newer inhabitants of the once euphemistically-named outlying districts now claim, stretching a point, to live in Kentish Town. Evidently Kentish Town, as well as becoming properly visible again for the first time in a century, is also growing larger. The day has not quite come when Millfield Lane, a charming example of pickled rurality leading from Highgate West Hill past Parliament Hill Ponds to the secluded and woody Fitzroy Estate, calls itself Kentish Town again, but it cannot, I feel, be far off.

However, those who live indisputably within present-day Kentish Town show a considerable unanimity on the subject of its boundaries. ‘Real’ Kentish Town is contained, north and south, by two railway bridges, visual barriers like the gates of a mediaeval city. The northern one crosses Highgate Road at the level of Gordon House Road, shortly before the apparent open country of Parliament Hill on the west is deceptively reached – though there is a good case for Kentish Town continuing, on the eastern side of the main road, as far as Swain’s Lane. The southern one crosses Kentish Town Road and Camden Street; the viaduct whose arches collapsed spectacularly during building in 1849 because the Fleet had been insufficiently considered. Below that, and over the sizeable barrier of the Regent’s Park Canal, one is abruptly in Camden Town.

East and west the frontiers are less defined; but most people agree that west Kentish Town bleeds off fairly quickly into Chalk Farm about two-thirds the way along Prince of Wales Road, going toward Haverstock Hill. On the eastern side one might take Camden Road (a piece of early nineteenth-century town planning) as the obvious frontier, and this is about right – except that, from the accident of its name, Camden Road and its environs seem to enjoy a spurious participation in Camden Town. There are those who would see even the district over to the east of Camden Road, the Camden Square district, ‘Camden New Town’ of the mid-nineteenth century, as a part of Kentish Town, right to the old frontier of York Way (Maiden Lane), with Agar Grove as its southernmost outpost – but then this is sliding into the area that
was
Kentish Town once, but had become, by 1600, Norden’s ‘utterly forsaken’ place.

Further up the Camden Road, from its junction with York Way, there is no dispute. The ancient route of York Way becomes, at that point, Brecknock Road, and nobody at all in Kentish Town has the slightest doubt that what lies on the far side of Brecknock Road is alien territory, unknown, unvisited. It is Islington, a different borough with different schools, shopping centres and communication-systems. The very names of its roads are unfamiliar, even to those who live only a few minutes walk away. It is known that Dr Crippen murdered his wife among those roads, but that is all.

In this way, by subtle and variegated signs that go unperceived by the stranger, the inhabitants of any urban area define and colonise their particular bit of territory. Only to the uninformed eye, or the jaundiced eye of a commuter passing through districts that are not his own and never stopping there, is a townscape a ‘formless morass’. London may be, as Chesterton said, a collection of submerged villages, but to the inhabitants they are not even fully submerged. People’s attachment to ‘their’ street may be just as tenacious and appreciative as the attachment of a smallholder to his particular fields, of a hunting tribesman to a known area of scrub and woodland. The instinctive allegiance which primitive man gives to a natural habitat (large trees, hills, streams, etc.), urban man transfers to man-made landmarks, but the essential nature of that allegiance remains the same.

Yet town planners have persistently ignored this component in human life and, in ignoring it, have done obscure violence to it. In their rationalistic cosmopolitanism, they have failed to grasp that just because you transfer the descendants of ploughmen to paved streets, or turn villages into urban areas, you do not in fact alter human beings; they will still make their villages where they can. The only difference is that their tenancy will be more precarious, more at the mercy of ill-informed bureaucratic decisions, or vainglorious architectural experiments. And if imposed controls produce a landscape which diverges
too
far from the traditional, a desert without domestic scale or subtlety or variety, then the instinct of attachment to the place wilts and fails. We are very ready, today, to concede people’s need for ‘meaningful human relationships’, yet we fail almost entirely to realise that other relationships, with places, objects, views – other supports for the human psyche – may be just as profoundly important, and that, if these are denied, the resulting impoverishment of the person may have deep and lasting consequences.

Local history develops its own local conventions. It has become customary for anyone writing about the St Pancras – Kentish Town area to quote the Domesday list of its manors and then to go on to discuss the subsequent ownership of each in some form that makes apparent sense. Compilers of potted histories in local borough publications have made much use of evasive phrases such as ‘the manor then passed to' or ‘came into the possession of' such-and-such a family, and statements plucked from contemporary documents give apparent authenticity and authority to the whole. I say ‘apparent' because, however true individual statements may be, the overall effect they are used to produce – that of a clear and logical sequence of landlords through the centuries in each of four clearly defined manors – is to some extent fictitious. The fact is that the four manors mentioned in Domesday, one of which in any case is not called a manor, probably bear only a tenuous relationship to the later mediaeval manorial holdings in the district.

Nor, for that matter, is the mediaeval pattern itself entirely clear. It has been confidently reiterated that in the old Borough of St Pancras (roughly the once-extensive parish of St Pancras church) we are dealing with four manors as follows: the large manor of Tottenhall (Tottenham Court), the smaller ‘lay' manor of St Pancras, the even smaller prebendal manor, and the larger manor of Cantelowes which is usually identified with Kentish Town. In addition, there was the somewhat spectral manor of Rugmere, thought to have occupied part of Regent's Park. But in fact the evidence that there ever were two absolutely distinct manors of St Pancras is rather slight; only one St Pancras manor house is ever referred to. In the ecclesiastical survey of 1251 the
parish
of St Pancras is reported as containing three manor houses. It seems not unreasonable to identify these as Tottenhall (near the site of the present Tolmer Square, behind Euston Road); St Pancras, which I personally believe to have stood on the east side of the King's Road (St Pancras Way) near the present Agar Grove; and Cantelowes, which I believe to have stood in the same area but a little to the north and on the opposite side of the road.

Lists of the lords of the various manors, with dates, sound similarly incontrovertible, but are not actually much use in determining who was effectively in charge of what land. All three manors (or four, if we count St Pancras as two) belonged ultimately to St Paul's Cathedral: they were granted by the Dean and Chapter to other people as ‘prebends' – the term can also be applied to the holder himself as well as to the grant made to him. But this simply meant that the revenue from those manor lands would go to the possessor and to his immediate heirs: to be a prebend, or to hold a prebend, did not necessarily mean, therefore, that one lived in the place and farmed it oneself – usually not, in fact. The manorial system had started, probably long before the Conquest, as a method of social organisation. Originally it depended on serfage, a form of slavery; the lord of the manor protected the serfs in return for their labour on his land and their allegiance to him in battle. But, as the middle ages progressed, more and more serfs gained the limited freedom of peasants; under the ‘copyhold' system, which was not finally abolished till 1922, they became tenants of the manor lands, paying a nominal rent. Thus, in time, the old intimate bond between master and man slackened, and by the fourteenth century very many villagers were in effect small tenant farmers under an absentee landlord. To be a lord of the manor was no longer necessarily to sit in a manor house presiding over the doings of a subservient body of churls: instead, manors had become commodities to be bought and sold, like industrial concerns today. Indeed the comparison between an early feudal manor held ‘in hand' by the lord himself, and the same manor several centuries later, is like that between the mediaeval workshop, with a master presiding personally over a handful of journeymen and apprentices, and a present-day public company in which anyone can hold shares and which may be only one part of a much larger combine anyway.

Thus the same ground landlord might own more than one manor in the same area (as did St Paul's); or two manors adjacent to one another might, further down the scale of control, be in the effective possession of the same family. This would naturally lead to a blurring of distinction between them. Or, alternatively, old manors might be split up into two or more smaller holdings (as seems to have happened originally with Kenwood at Highgate, and Kentish Town, or indeed with the two manors of St Pancras). Nor were men who had simply rented manors, or married into them, averse to assuming the role, if not the actual title, of ‘the lord'. Moreover a district might include a substantial freehold house belonging to a notable, who might well be the nearest thing around to an actual lord.

Nor, indeed, is the traditional school history book image of a manor house, as a substantial residence set squarely in the centre of the manorial lands, necessarily realistic. In many areas, manorial holdings were split up, because of buying and selling and marriages and bequests, into several segments. Nor was the manor house where one existed (which was by no means always the case) necessarily ‘fit for a lord'. In manors where the land was seldom, if ever, in hand, the manor house might be no more than a farm with outbuildings, lived in by the steward or let off to another tenant. The manor courts, attended by copyholders, which performed many of the functions of the later vestry councils, were held as often as not in inns.

Later, after the upheavals of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, there was a tendency for land-holdings in London to become concentrated in the hands of a few great families. Cantelowes manor, consisting of about 210 acres on the east side of the town, was seized after the execution of Charles I and sold off to two London merchants; ten years later, after the Restoration, it was returned to the family who had held it just before the Commonwealth. From thence, by a route that is not clear, it passed about 1670 into the possession of the Jeffreys family, of Judge Jeffreys fame – the Judge is reputed to have owned a house in Kentish Town. In the following century a Jeffreys granddaughter married Charles Pratt, who was created Baron Camden in 1765 and Viscount Bayham and Earl of Camden in 1786. It was this first Earl of Camden who managed to get an Act through Parliament to enable him to lay the southern part of his estate out in building leases: hence Camden Town, and the streets in it which take their names from Camden family connections. There is a Jeffreys Street in Kentish Town, one of the oldest and most architecturally attractive of the area, and Brecknock (as in Road and Arms) was a Camden family seat.

In contrast, the St Pancras manor or manors became divided, as time went by, into several parcels. In the sixteenth century the Skinners Company Estate and what was to become the Foundling Hospital Estate became separated off in the south, in present day Bloomsbury, as did the Aldenham (Platt's) Estate near the church on the west of the Fleet. After the Restoration, the Somers family acquired most of the rest of that area – whence Somers Town. The smaller section to the east of the Fleet, apparently known as the prebendal manor (as distinct from the lay manor) passed through several different tenancies in the late eighteenth century before being acquired by the Agar family, the notorious shantytown landlords who are commemorated in Agar Grove.

Tottenhall Manor, having been leased by St Paul's to the Crown in the sixteenth century, was also seized on the establishment of the Commonwealth and sold to one Ralph Harrison. At the Restoration the manor reverted to the Crown, and from thence came into the possession of Isabella, Countess of Arlington, who left it to her son, Charles Fitzroy, one of Charles II's many progeny. It was still in the Fitzroy family in the late eighteenth century, when the current Charles Fitzroy became Lord Southampton. He had only a leasehold interest in the property, but, through the good offices of his uncle, the Duke of Grafton, then Prime Minister, he managed to have an Act put through Parliament converting his leasehold to a freehold to himself and his heirs for ever. The annual compensation paid to the then-prebendary and to the Church was trifling by comparison with the enormous value which the estate, as building land, acquired over the next two generations. A writer in the
Morning Chronicle
in 1837 (cited by Howitt) reckoned that, for an outlay of only £17,784 to date, the Southampton family had by then received at least a million and a half from this estate, and more was to follow. Such was the nature of the speculation in land to which the old manorial holdings finally lent themselves. West Kentish Town was part of the result, including the house which today proclaims its fields beneath.

Once manors and lords were a thing of the past in St Pancras, a folk memory of them lingered on, sentimentalised by Victorian notions of rustic Good Old Days. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century a timbered building of Elizabethan or Jacobean origin still stood half way up Kentish Town High Road on the right hand or eastern side; in fact this was the house built
c.
1600 for Sir Thomas Hewett, whose father had been a Lord Mayor of London. The estate later passed to his son George Hewett, who inherited at the age of eleven and lived to become Viscount Hewett of Gowran, Co. Kilkenny. He left it to Robert South, a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, who in turn left it to his college when he died. This was the Christ Church Estate, which was laid out during the nineteenth century with roads named after Oxford associations – Caversham Road, Islip Street, Peckwater Street etc. Until it was built on, the land was leased from Christ Church by the Morgan family, prosperous local farmers of whom we shall hear again, and the old timbered house became known as ‘Morgan's Farm'. Thus the history of this house is clear: it was not a manor house. Yet, by the end of its days, it had acquired a local fame as ‘The Old Kentish Town Manor House'; pictures of it were so labelled by the Heals, father and son, in their local history collection, and the belief has continued to lead a life of its own.

A persistent confusion has also occurred between this house and a fifteenth-century house which disappeared much earlier and which in any case almost certainly stood in a different part of the district, nearer to St Pancras church. It was owned by an illustrious inhabitant of Kentish Town, who was not lord of any manor. His name was William Bruges (or Bregges or Bridges) and he is remembered as having been the first Garter King of Arms, a diplomatic post placing him way above the level of a local squire. Appointed Garter by the newly crowned Henry V in 1415, Bruges probably attended the installation of the German Emperor Sigismund (the title was a Holy Roman Empire one) in the Order of the Garter in the early summer of 1416: at any rate it appears that later in the summer, while the Emperor was still in England, he entertained him at his house in Kentish Town.

The grandeur of this official function was considerable; Kentish Town has never seen the like again. Among those invited were representatives of the City livery companies, the mayor, assorted knights and heralds, the Bishop of Ely on a palfry clothed in white and gold and with suitable attendance, two dukes, several lords, the Prince of Hungary and the Emperor Sigismund himself, each with their retinue, besides sundry other gentlemen, esquires and officers at arms. It is recorded that they set out in mounted cavalcade, ‘with exceeding great pomp', covered in ‘Jewels, Gold Chains, rich embroideries etc. [which] dazzled the eyes of the innumerable multitude of people who flocked from the City of London.' A mile outside Kentish Town, in a field described as ‘arable' (presumably this meeting took place after harvest time?) Bruges and his retinue were waiting to greet their noble guests, Bruges himself on his knees, cap in hand. After extravagant courtesies on both sides, the procession made its way to the house, where minstrels were playing. Then everyone sat down to an almost unbelievably extensive meal, among whose ingredients were casually included such choice items as ‘7 sheep', ‘200 pigeons', ‘100 green geese', ‘30 great carp', ‘1 gallon welks', ‘1,000 eggs', ‘200 lbs butter' and ‘cock-combs innumerable'. The cost amounted to the then enormous sum of £192. 17
s
. 8½
d
.

It was all for one sitting: the record does not say that the party stayed at Kentish Town; nor could any mere country house of the period have been large enough to accommodate them. One is inclined to imagine an orgy of gluttony going on for hour after hour, but the answer is probably that they didn't actually eat it all and weren't meant to. Feasts of such dimensions were in the nature of a public-relations exercise, a crude display of conspicuous consumption intended to impress rather than to sustain. They remained so for many centuries afterwards, in fact into the Victorian era. Doubtless, therefore, the less grand inhabitants of Kentish Town lived royally for weeks on the ample remains. It is worth noting that the feast consisted almost entirely of meat in various forms plus eggs and fish – protein and yet more protein, at a time when the staple diet of the labouring classes was rye bread and wheaten bread eked out with diary products and probably only an occasional meat dish, when a pig or an ageing plough-ox was killed. Despite the social dislocation of the Black Death (first visitation, 1348) and a consequent rise in the wages of skilled men like masons and thatchers, the social inequalities of the fifteenth century were still massive. I do not know how large the hamlet of Kentish Town was then. In the whole of St Pancras parish, 125 years earlier, there had been only forty households. A few new houses were apparently built when the church was re-modelled in 1330, but it was probably not a great deal larger by Bruges's day, since populations increased slowly in those harsh times.

Thus, as early as 1416 the nature of life in Kentish Town was already modified by the presence in the hamlet of wealthy outsiders, whose main life and work and even dwelling did not actually lie there. In this respect, villages within easy walking or riding distance of a large town are subtly affected in their social organisation centuries before their external appearance is greatly changed. Kentish Town retained its air of a typical English village certainly into the eighteenth and almost into the nineteenth century. Yet long before that time it had ceased to be an autonomous rural community, and for centuries before it was built over its agriculture was affected by the needs of London.