Free The Fields Beneath by Gillian Tindall

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:
    â€¦ 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