[171] F. Miller, St. Pancras, 269.
[172] Highbury Barn, i.e., the grange or farm of Highbury Manor, is mentioned by that name at an early period, and there are extant various leases of it of the fifteenth century, granted by the Prior and Convent of St. John of Jerusalem (e.g. “our certain grange, situate upon the site of our manor of Highbury called Highbury Barn”—see Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington). The name Highbury Barn is, therefore, much older than the date of the incorporation of the large barn of Highbury Farm with the Highbury Tavern premises.
[173] The site of the Prior’s house was occupied by a private residence called Highbury House built in 1781 and immediately opposite the Highbury Barn Tavern.
[174] The Highbury Society, formed by Protestant Dissenters to commemorate the abandonment of the Schism Bill at the end of the reign of Anne, met at first at Copenhagen House, but about 1740 assembled at Highbury Barn. The members beguiled their pilgrimage from Moorfields to Highbury by bowling a ball of ivory at objects in their path. This society was dissolved about 1833.
[175] The younger Willoughby was certainly proprietor in 1792 and later, and Lewis says he succeeded his father on the death of the latter in December 1785. In May 1789 Highbury House (Nichols, Canonbury, p. 31, note) opposite the Tavern was sold by auction, as were also Highbury Tea House with gardens and bowling-green and two good messuages adjoining, together with many fields in the neighbourhood. This sale does not, however, necessarily imply any change in the management of Highbury Barn, which may at that time have been only rented by Willoughby from the owner of Highbury House and the adjoining property.
[176] A few years previous to 1811 Willoughby cultivated at one end of the gardens a small plantation of hops, and afterwards erected a brewery on the premises. Highbury Barn was sometimes called “Willoughby’s Tea Gardens” (Picture of London, 1802).
[177] Lysons, Nelson and Lewis all identify the moated house called in the Survey of 1611 “The Devil’s House” or the “Lower House” with the old Tallington or Tollington Manor House. In the survey of the roads of Islington (Nelson’s Islington, p. 20), however, both Tallington House and Devil’s House are separately marked, the two being divided by Heame Lane, a lane running at right angles to Tallington (Devil’s) Lane. This Tallington House must therefore have been an eighteenth-century residence and not the old Manor House.
[178] Nelson (Islington), writing about 1811, says that about thirty or forty years before his time (1776?) the landlord’s name was Fawcett.
[179] This seems to be implied by Nelson (Islington, 1811), who says that in his time the old “house had been fitted up in the modern taste.”
[180] Lewis’s Islington, 1841, mentions the house as still existing, and it is described as still standing in Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington, a work published in 1858, but in part written nine years before the date of publication.