The Fields Beneath (10 page)

The resident population, on the partial evidence of the manorial records, continued to grow, if slowly. A general survey of St Pancras taxpayers made in 1693 lists some 450 names. Nicholas Hawksmoor's sister-in-law moved into a property in Swain's – or Swine's – Lane. (Swine seems to have been the old name, and its transformation to ‘Swain' a piece of late eighteenth-century pastoral conceit.) Woodehouse, writing in 1699, described as ‘deserted' the area near the church, in which his own ‘nearly ruined mansion of bygone date' (Bruges's mansion) appears to have lain, but five years later he added a note in the margin of his book – ‘Some houses are now building near the church'. It was one of these houses which, within a generation, was ‘noted for a mineral spring': the Adam and Eve public house and pleasure garden. Though less famous than the Bagnigge Wells down the road near Battle Bridge, the St Pancras Wells long had a raffish renown. But Woodehouse lived just before the era of the wells and pleasure gardens, and to him the part he lived in was ‘a neglected parish' whose chief interest lay in its past, for ‘there is such an interest in its lands, its every highway and byeway, that irrestibly urges on my weak pen to draw from oblivion and pourtray to the best of my ability the many claims to notice and attention which it possesses.'

Woodehouse was, as we have seen, a JP for a time (but see pages 239– 40), and at the end of his account of the area appear some of his court papers. These include evidence of several robberies (silver watches, silk handkerchiefs, cheeses waiting in a cart outside the Castle Inn, a pair of plush breeches) and also a couple of cases of attempted rape – or asserted rape. One of these displays incidentally a whole spectrum of attitudes and life styles, all of which are still recognisable:

Four years earlier a different sort of case occurred in which Woodehouse does not seem to have played any official role but which excited his interest sufficiently for him to record it in detail. It concerned the persecution of an old couple for witchcraft, and it is interesting to compare Woodehouse's enlightened, rationalistic, eighteenth-century view (‘A most dreadful instance of the dismal effect of superstition') with the credulous and obsessional tone of the pamphlet quoted in the previous chapter, which dates from sixty years earlier.

The account continues with more detailed evidence from the trial, which followed when two men were apprehended for murder (the government, as unsympathetic towards ‘superstition' as Woodehouse himself, had offered a large reward for their capture). One of them, Wallis, was hanged with some ceremony on the spot where the murder had been committed, and Woodehouse recorded: ‘the infatuation of the people is such that they will not be seen near the place of execution, insisting that it was a hard case to hang a man for destroying an old woman that had done so much injury by her witchcraft.' Belief in witchcraft had evidently, by then, become a matter of class. Wallis's body hung in chains for a while, which must have made two gibbets within a short distance of one another (his and that of Clun's murderer).

Oddly enough, the witch who is remembered as ‘the Shrew of Kentish Town', and is commemorated to this day in the Mother Red Cap pub at Camden Town, never seems to have been brought to justice at all. Evidence about the date of her time on earth is conflicting, but one account identifies her with the Mother Damnable who lived through the Commonwealth (when, it will be remembered, witches were discovered everywhere) and states that she was the death of several men who lived with her and that she practised magic both black and white. Her father was said to have been Jacob Bingham, a bricklayer of Kentish Town. A later account, however, identified her with a camp-follower of Marlborough's army (i.e. the period at which Woodehouse was writing), but since this also states that she lived to 120 the one identification does not exclude the other. She was said to have lived in a mud cottage on or near the site of the present public house which, as a meeting place for two roads, was a classic place for a witch's habitation. All that these various stories indicate, no doubt, in historical terms, is that there were a succession of wise women in Kentish Town, as in most villages, and that such outcasts tended to live in the hinterlands between settlements, by cross-roads, gibbets and other unfrequented regions.

Queen Anne's reign appears as something of a watershed in St Pancras between the old world and the new. Scenes like the drowning of Mrs Osburn could take place, with the authorities apparently powerless to stop them, yet at the same time there were families already settled or settling in the area who were to influence its development well into the nineteenth century. The first Morgans appeared in the area then; another prominent local dynasty, whose interests lay partly outside our area but who for many years farmed land round St Pancras church and to the south of it, were the Rhodes. The family name now enjoys a curious afterglow: the same family produced Cecil Rhodes, whose name is remembered in the state of Rhodesia. But Cecil himself had no connection with the parish of St Pancras, except that, in 1890, he had erected a large, collective monument in the churchyard commemorating several previous generations of this proliferating family who had previously been buried there (and presumably – some of them – dug up again when the land was disturbed in 1868 by the Midland Railway workings). The Rhodes family owned the Chalk Farm at one time (outside the parish) and later had a farmhouse in the Hampstead Road just north of where the Temperance Hospital now stands: amazingly, the last vestiges of this farm survived till 1934. Several generations of them were active, not to say dictatorial, in the St Pancras vestry, towards the end of the eighteenth century and the early part of the next; they were probably well-established in the district by the time William Rhodes began appending his signature to vestry documents – in an awkward, unlettered hand – about 1740.

The vestry was by then attracting to itself the power and influence which the manor court had once had, and had allowed to escape in many cases into private hands. In 1725 it was reported in the vestry that the lord of the manor of Cantelowes had sold or given away most of the wastes and commons, and that people had built on them to the injury of tenants and the inhabitants of the parish. It seems to have been Kentish Town Green (up Highgate Road, opposite the Bull and Last, i.e. in the almost separate hamlet of Green Street) which was particularly threatened. The vestry voted rights to its churchwardens and constables to remove any fresh fences. The point was, of course, that once the common lands had been appropriated by individual copyholders, other people, including the many who were not manorial tenants anyway, had nowhere to graze their cows, goats or pigs. Indeed the problems of land use are clear from the court rolls themselves. In the 1730s two copyholders were ordered to refrain from keeping hogs near their neighbours' houses, and at the same period there were repeated and apparently fruitless requests to Widow Lawrence that she should cease to keep her carts on the waste – the earliest example I have found of a parking offence in the area. In 1735 she re-married, and representations were therefore made to her husband. He later became a constable, so perhaps he complied with the request. At the same court Jasper Garland, a brick-layer, was asked to remove a bank he had erected in Swine's Lane.

By then, brick-layers or makers crop up commonly. Contemporary prints show that the brick and tile kilns that were to pollute the air round Battle Bridge and St Pancras church for the next hundred years, were already flourishing. Nor were those with farming interests necessarily distinct from those with building interests. One of the Morgan clan, as well as owning land in Kentish Town, appears to have been a mason of Holborn. The Rhodes family eventually turned many of their 300 acres over to brick-making, and intermarried with the Harrison family of Battle Bridge, who were kiln owners as well as farmers.

The population of London proper in 1700 is variously calculated at 575,000 or 675,000, depending on whether or not one thinks that it increased much between 1700 and 1750. If it did not in fact increase much at that period, then the expansion of the city that certainly took place during those years must have been due to families moving from small to larger premises – an increase, in fact, in living standards and in the numbers of the middle classes rather than a numerical increase. What is undisputed, however, is that much new building and thus actual population increase took place then in districts which only subsequently – and in consequence – came to be regarded as part of London. The pamphleteer Daniel Defoe complained in 1724 that London was becoming ‘a vast mass … how much further may it spread, who knows? … [in] a most straggling, confus'd manner, out of all shape, uncompact and unequal … Westminister is in a fair way to shake hands with Chelsea, as St Giles is with Marylebone; and Great Russel Street by Montague House with Tottanham Court.' Two of the districts he mentions, Chelsea and Marylebone-with-St Pancras (as the two parishes were then styled), together with Knightsbridge, Hammer-smith and Paddington, were known as the Five Villages Outside the Bills of Mortality. It is known that the combined population of these villages increased from little over nine thousand in 1700 to one hundred and twenty-three thousand in 1801 – by which latter date they were well established as being
de facto
parts of London – but most of that increase probably took place during the last few decades of the eighteenth century. It has been stated that the population of St Pancras in 1776 was still only six hundred souls, and though this may be an underestimation it is known that the real population explosion only began at about this date.