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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