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Authors: Gillian Tindall
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Thomas Ive referred to in the 1490s was the grandson of the original one who would by then have been rather old for such activities â âThomas Ive has broken and entered the pinfold of the Lord [i.e. lord of the manor] and driven away his cattle there. 12 d taken for trespass and pasture.â The following year we find him, undaunted, litigating about felled trees and obstructed watercourses. There were also debts complained against him.
I think it was, however, the first Thomas Ive, the court official and the grandfather of the hedgebreaker, who maintained a running battle with Robert Warner or Wariner a generation earlier. This Warner, another local landowner of some substance and a member of the Grocersâ Company, was the one who, in 1440, presented to the parish the plot of land in the new centre of the village on which the chapel of ease was built (see Chapter 2). To the parishioners who came to ask him to sell that plot, he said that he had bought it only recently and that if he were to sell it again people would say he was in need of the money, so âfor the worship of God and the welfare of the parishionersâ he preferred to give it to them. He marked out the ground himself with stakes, leaving room at the front for processions, gave £5 towards the building, though other parishioners also contributed, and apparently superintended the building himself. It is clear that Warner, whatever his legal title in the village, was playing the authoritarian and possessive role of Squire Bountiful, familiar in later centuries. Perhaps Thomas Ive did not like this and saw Warnerâs handsome gesture as a threat to his own position â he who had just bought Brugesâs fine mansion for 360 marks. At any rate a struggle for precedence took place between the two families, with Ive and his lady and their servants marching in and sitting in Warnerâs own pew in the chancel. Upon this, Robert Warner declared âit would be the worse for them allâ, and took the key away from the vicar on several occasions, saying that no service should be held in the chapel while Ive was present. Thomas Ive eventually brought an action against Warner in Chancery (says Godfrey in the London Survey , Vol. XIX but he does not say how the matter was finally resolved).
The next century brought far-reaching changes in England, with the dispossession of the monasteries, the Reformation, and finally the increasing prosperity of the Elizabethan period. Church livings, always financial assets, became delicate political commodities. In 1551, under Edward VI, the boy-king son of Henry VIII, we find Dr Ridley, then Bishop of London (later to be martyred under Mary) attempting to obtain the living of St Pancras for one or another of his protégés:
Now there is fallen a prebend in Paulâs with the Vicarage of a poor parish in Middlesex called the prebend of Cantrells and Vicarage of St Pancras, by death of one Layton [who had been in any case dispossessed by Henry VIII]. This prebend is an honest manâs living of thirty-four pound and better and the Vicarage very small in the Kingâs books. I would with all my heart give them unto Master Grindall and so I should have him continually with me, and in my diocese to preach. *
Someone else, a master William Thomas, one of the clerks to the council, was apparently after the same living. In the end Ridley gave it not to Grindall but to another protégé named in his original letter â one Bradford. But those were difficult times. Neither Grindall nor Bradford appear in the London Survey list of vicars; by 1569, when Ridley had died under Mary and Elizabeth had been queen for eleven years, the ruling authorities were for some reason taking steps to stop Grindall preaching at âSt Pancras otherwise Kentyshetowneâ and sending him fierce notes about it.
There is a persistent tale that St Pancras Old Church was the last parish church in England
I think it was, however, the first Thomas Ive, the court official and the grandfather of the hedgebreaker, who maintained a running battle with Robert Warner or Wariner a generation earlier. This Warner, another local landowner of some substance and a member of the Grocersâ Company, was the one who, in 1440, presented to the parish the plot of land in the new centre of the village on which the chapel of ease was built (see Chapter 2). To the parishioners who came to ask him to sell that plot, he said that he had bought it only recently and that if he were to sell it again people would say he was in need of the money, so âfor the worship of God and the welfare of the parishionersâ he preferred to give it to them. He marked out the ground himself with stakes, leaving room at the front for processions, gave £5 towards the building, though other parishioners also contributed, and apparently superintended the building himself. It is clear that Warner, whatever his legal title in the village, was playing the authoritarian and possessive role of Squire Bountiful, familiar in later centuries. Perhaps Thomas Ive did not like this and saw Warnerâs handsome gesture as a threat to his own position â he who had just bought Brugesâs fine mansion for 360 marks. At any rate a struggle for precedence took place between the two families, with Ive and his lady and their servants marching in and sitting in Warnerâs own pew in the chancel. Upon this, Robert Warner declared âit would be the worse for them allâ, and took the key away from the vicar on several occasions, saying that no service should be held in the chapel while Ive was present. Thomas Ive eventually brought an action against Warner in Chancery (says Godfrey in the London Survey , Vol. XIX but he does not say how the matter was finally resolved).
The next century brought far-reaching changes in England, with the dispossession of the monasteries, the Reformation, and finally the increasing prosperity of the Elizabethan period. Church livings, always financial assets, became delicate political commodities. In 1551, under Edward VI, the boy-king son of Henry VIII, we find Dr Ridley, then Bishop of London (later to be martyred under Mary) attempting to obtain the living of St Pancras for one or another of his protégés:
Now there is fallen a prebend in Paulâs with the Vicarage of a poor parish in Middlesex called the prebend of Cantrells and Vicarage of St Pancras, by death of one Layton [who had been in any case dispossessed by Henry VIII]. This prebend is an honest manâs living of thirty-four pound and better and the Vicarage very small in the Kingâs books. I would with all my heart give them unto Master Grindall and so I should have him continually with me, and in my diocese to preach. *
Someone else, a master William Thomas, one of the clerks to the council, was apparently after the same living. In the end Ridley gave it not to Grindall but to another protégé named in his original letter â one Bradford. But those were difficult times. Neither Grindall nor Bradford appear in the London Survey list of vicars; by 1569, when Ridley had died under Mary and Elizabeth had been queen for eleven years, the ruling authorities were for some reason taking steps to stop Grindall preaching at âSt Pancras otherwise Kentyshetowneâ and sending him fierce notes about it.
There is a persistent tale that St Pancras Old Church was the last parish church in England
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