Free The Fields Beneath by Gillian Tindall Page A

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 manor 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