Free The Fields Beneath by Gillian Tindall Page B

Bartholomew’s Priory and Hospital, in return for the usual Masses for his soul, was still in the possession of Bart’s in the mid-nineteenth century, when streets were laid out on it bearing Bartholomew’s name.
    An even clearer persistence through time is found in the case of Heron’s Gift, consisting of £8 left in 1580 for repaving the roads of the hamlet. By 1861, when the various ‘paving boards’, an untidy legacy from the eighteenth century, were finally swallowed by the Metropolitan Board of Works, this legacy had, with investment, swollen to £41. 19 s .8 d .– though, taking inflation into account, this does not seem an overall gain. I owe this piece of information about Heron’s Gift to Palmer ( History of St Pancras , 1870). But what Palmer does not seem to have guessed at is a possible connection between Heron’s gift in 1580 and the curious presence in the borough of some old slate paving, on which he comments: ‘One of the peculiarities of Kentish Town still preserved … It certainly bears a very clean and pleasing appearance, and very soon becomes dry, but in wet and frosty weather is dangerous in the extreme. The slabs of almost polished slate make it as difficult to walk upon as the polished oak floors of our ancient family mansions …’
    In 1582 Sir John Stonehouse ‘of Kentish Town, Knight’, whose wife had died before him, left capital represented by forty shillings to be given yearly in bread to the poor of St Pancras, to twelve poor men a frieze gown, shirt and pair of shoes and to twelve poor women of the same parish a frieze gown, shift and pair of shoes. He stated that this should be done on October 1st each year – in time for the winter chill and wet. But Woodehouse, noting this in his journal 120 years later, commented ‘No such charity now known’. Money, being flexible in use, lasts longer than more precise bequests: much more durable was Platt’s Gift, also given (in 1637) in memory of a deceased wife. It consisted of some of the revenue from lands given to St John’s College, Cambridge in what is now the north part of Kentish Town but was then a separate hamlet within St Pancras known as Green Street – £20 yearly for the poor of Kentish Town. That twenty pounds is still on offer today; notices are posted about it in the local public library. But it is not always easy to find ten modern old age pensioners who will stand up in a public meeting and ask for it.
    Equally and more profitably durable was Palmer’s Gift. Eleanor Palmer was the daughter of a cofferer of Henry VII and wife to John Palmer of Kentish Town, whom she out-lived. She seems to have been of a slightly higher social class than her husband, and the extensive copyhold lands they held in both Cantelowes and Totenhale came from her side of the family. One of their daughters married a son of Lord Paget – he who sold his house at Kentish Town to the ill-fated Lady Bellamy. When she died in 1558, Eleanor bequeathed to the poor of Kentish Town a third part of the profits of three acres of land situated near the Fortys Field (now Fortess Terrace, Fortess Road – which has nothing to do with ‘fortress’). Writing about this property in 1870, Samuel Palmer (no relation, I think) remarked that ‘In 1696 it produced £2. 10 s ; in 1810, £14, and now it produces £50 per annum.’ It had by then been built upon and its revenue was helping to fund some almshouses: ‘On the renewal of the lease,’ he added, ‘it will bring in a very much larger sum.’ This remark, indeed, might stand as a classic understated comment on the history of once-farm land turned into brick and mortar. Today, the revenue is the property of The Fortys Field Housing Association, a charitable trust, and part of it is occupied by a primary school, built in the late 1960s to replace an older one and called Eleanor Palmer. I hope she