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Authors: Gillian Tindall
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public-relations exercise, a crude display of conspicuous consumption intended to impress rather than to sustain. They remained so for many centuries afterwards, in fact into the Victorian era. Doubtless, therefore, the less grand inhabitants of Kentish Town lived royally for weeks on the ample remains. It is worth noting that the feast consisted almost entirely of meat in various forms plus eggs and fish â protein and yet more protein, at a time when the staple diet of the labouring classes was rye bread and wheaten bread eked out with diary products and probably only an occasional meat dish, when a pig or an ageing plough-ox was killed. Despite the social dislocation of the Black Death (first visitation, 1348) and a consequent rise in the wages of skilled men like masons and thatchers, the social inequalities of the fifteenth century were still massive. I do not know how large the hamlet of Kentish Town was then. In the whole of St Pancras parish, 125 years earlier, there had been only forty households. A few new houses were apparently built when the church was re-modelled in 1330, but it was probably not a great deal larger by Brugesâs day, since populations increased slowly in those harsh times.
Thus, as early as 1416 the nature of life in Kentish Town was already modified by the presence in the hamlet of wealthy outsiders, whose main life and work and even dwelling did not actually lie there. In this respect, villages within easy walking or riding distance of a large town are subtly affected in their social organisation centuries before their external appearance is greatly changed. Kentish Town retained its air of a typical English village certainly into the eighteenth and almost into the nineteenth century. Yet long before that time it had ceased to be an autonomous rural community, and for centuries before it was built over its agriculture was affected by the needs of London.
Bruges referred in his will to the chapel belonging to his house and to his great barn there. The property had a frontage of some 130 yards on the LondonâHarringay highway, and in 1446 Bruges was authorised to take a twenty-foot strip off the road in order to make a ditch to protect the place. This would not however have been a moat in quite the early mediaeval sense of the term for, as the engines of war became more sophisticated, the old style fortified manor house ceased to offer any real defence; its moat, tower etc. became more a matter of tradition and grandeur than of strict utility. Indeed the fifteenth century saw the first building of the English country house, whose presence was to dominate English landscape and society for centuries; the earliest appearance of the rural idyll, which we shall meet again and again in the course of this account. Bruges was therefore a typical and fashionable example of his era, and his moat was most likely intended for keeping fish in for household consumption. Not, however, that he lived to enjoy it. He must have been getting on in life in 1446, thirty years after the famous dinner party, and he died in 1449. The house itself was not disposed of in his will, but he bequeathed a number of its chapel fittings to a church in his native Lincolnshire, so it looks as if he intended it to be sold. At all events it appears to have been bought in 1452 by a Sir Thomas Ive, a court official.
The Ive family figure quite prominently in local records for this period, and later, in the seventeenth century, we find them still in the area. In the fifteenth century they seem to have been a troublesome and a litigious family. Because of the habit of calling sons and grandsons after fathers, it is always difficult to know which generation one is dealing with â the sparse manor court records that record rows about landholdings were kept as minutes for people who knew personally whom they referred to and had the unlettered habit of keeping all information in their heads anyway. But I assume that the
Thus, as early as 1416 the nature of life in Kentish Town was already modified by the presence in the hamlet of wealthy outsiders, whose main life and work and even dwelling did not actually lie there. In this respect, villages within easy walking or riding distance of a large town are subtly affected in their social organisation centuries before their external appearance is greatly changed. Kentish Town retained its air of a typical English village certainly into the eighteenth and almost into the nineteenth century. Yet long before that time it had ceased to be an autonomous rural community, and for centuries before it was built over its agriculture was affected by the needs of London.
Bruges referred in his will to the chapel belonging to his house and to his great barn there. The property had a frontage of some 130 yards on the LondonâHarringay highway, and in 1446 Bruges was authorised to take a twenty-foot strip off the road in order to make a ditch to protect the place. This would not however have been a moat in quite the early mediaeval sense of the term for, as the engines of war became more sophisticated, the old style fortified manor house ceased to offer any real defence; its moat, tower etc. became more a matter of tradition and grandeur than of strict utility. Indeed the fifteenth century saw the first building of the English country house, whose presence was to dominate English landscape and society for centuries; the earliest appearance of the rural idyll, which we shall meet again and again in the course of this account. Bruges was therefore a typical and fashionable example of his era, and his moat was most likely intended for keeping fish in for household consumption. Not, however, that he lived to enjoy it. He must have been getting on in life in 1446, thirty years after the famous dinner party, and he died in 1449. The house itself was not disposed of in his will, but he bequeathed a number of its chapel fittings to a church in his native Lincolnshire, so it looks as if he intended it to be sold. At all events it appears to have been bought in 1452 by a Sir Thomas Ive, a court official.
The Ive family figure quite prominently in local records for this period, and later, in the seventeenth century, we find them still in the area. In the fifteenth century they seem to have been a troublesome and a litigious family. Because of the habit of calling sons and grandsons after fathers, it is always difficult to know which generation one is dealing with â the sparse manor court records that record rows about landholdings were kept as minutes for people who knew personally whom they referred to and had the unlettered habit of keeping all information in their heads anyway. But I assume that the
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