PLAN OF ISLINGTON
From a print in the British Museum. By the courtesy of the late Marquis of Salisbury.
On the north side of the City the Moor Fields continued for a long time as waste ground, seldom visited; in 1415, however, Thomas Fawconer, Mayor, broke through the City Wall and built the postern called Moorgate; he constructed causeways over the Moor; cleansed and repaired the dykes or ditches with which the Moor was intersected: so that the place was drained and made into a pleasant walk for the citizens, either on summer evenings, or on their way to Iselden and Hoxton. Sixty years later brickfields were opened in the Moor, and bricks made for the repair of the City Wall. Then citizens began to make and to enclose gardens in the Moor; in 1498 these were all taken away and an archery-field made in their place. In 1512 more dykes were made for the drainage of the Moor, and in 1527 conduits were constructed to carry the waters over the Tower Ditch into the Walbrook. The point is that in the sixteenth century the whole of the ground lying between Moorgate and Bishopsgate was unoccupied by houses. The map already referred to shows the road running north from Moorgate, and the Moor itself crossed by causeways: in the east a broad ditch crossed by bridges falls into the Tower Ditch.
The Moor formerly extended beyond Cripplegate and as far as the Fleet River; it was built upon by the Religious Houses; St. Bartholomew’s Priory and Hospital; the Charter House; the Priory of St. John; and the Nunnery of Clerkenwell. Between these houses and the wall were St. Giles’s Church, St. Botolph’s Church, Fore Street, Whitecross Street, and other streets, making a suburb with a population in the sixteenth century of 1800 householders, or 9000 souls. The last bit of the Moor left on the north-west of the City was brickfield.
We now come to the western suburb: the earliest settled and the most thickly populated of all. Fleet Street and the streets north of it, however, belonged to the Ward of Farringdon Without.
We are now in a position to show other reasons why the extension of the City was so slow and so limited.
All round the City lay manors and estates belonging for the most part to the Church. St. Paul’s Cathedral possessed a great many of these manors; the Bishop possessed many; St. Peter’s, Westminster, possessed many. Finsbury, Shoreditch, Hoxton, Iselden, St. Pancras, Willesden, belonged to St. Paul’s. The manor of St. Peter stretched all the way from Millbank to the Fleet River, and from the Thames to Holborn. These estates belonged to the Church; when the City received the County of Middlesex to farm, it did not receive these manors, and the owners had their rights. Foremost among these rights was that they were outside the jurisdiction of the City; the land could not be built upon without permission of the owners; what the City got was the inclusion of that part of the land outside the Wall which was bounded and defined by the Bars: that is to say, it included, without the Wall—(1) The Ward of Portsoken, formerly the lands of the Cnihten Gild; (2) The Common Land of Whitechapel; (3) The Common Land of the Moor as far as to the Fleet River, and (4) The Ward of Farringdon Without. Why did it go no farther? Because at every point beyond these limits the manors of the Church were met. At first the encroachments of the City authorities into the manors met with no opposition; perhaps the ecclesiastics felt that it was well to have the people on their lands well governed; on one occasion the City acquired rights by taking a manor on lease, as that of Mora di Halliwell in 1315. In other cases the ecclesiastics interfered and made it impossible for more houses to be built on their lands, save on their own terms, and without acknowledgment by the City Authority.
For these reasons, therefore,—the limited jurisdiction of the City; the steady opposition of the ecclesiastical owners of the manors outside; and the slow growth of the population,—there was little increase save in the direction of Bishopsgate Street Without, where the City had a lease of the manor, until the Dissolution of the Religious Houses and the change of owners in the manors.