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fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn’. He continued: ‘Beyond them, a forest extends, full of the lairs and coverts of beasts and game, stags, bucks, boars and wild bulls.’ Clearly, the frontiers of the great Forest of Middlesex, for so it was, had by now been pushed back, outlaws and all no doubt, to more manageable proportions: it formed the main hunting grounds for the citizens of London.
    The hamlet centred on St Pancras grew. According to a Visitation of the Churches made in 1251, there were by then thirty ordinary houses in the parish, four manor houses, and two moated, stone-built ones – the vicarage and the rectory.
    London was also growing, however slowly, and its needs were growing – for food and fodder and fuel. In 1218, the second year of the reign of Henry III, an edict went out that the forest lands should be cleared. As trees were cut down they went to build new timber houses in the city, or to replenish the hearths of those already built, and gradually more and more of the land came under the plough and had its rough contours smoothed into those rounded slopes which, in western Europe, we regard as natural landscape but which are really nothing of the kind. At first considerable portions of the forest were preserved, being now reserved hunting grounds for royalty: no doubt it was the presence of their hunting lodges in the area which have given rise to persistent tales of ‘King John’s Palace’ and the like. But time, and the ever-present needs of the nearby town, gradually eroded these preserves. Today the only remaining scraps of the once enormous Forest of Middlesex are Highgate Woods, and Ken Wood within Hampstead Heath, just on the edge of Kentish Town.

    Those familiar with the area may possibly, by now, be asking themselves when I am going to stop discussing the general history of St Pancras and home-in on Kentish Town proper. After all, St Pancras church and the early settlement round it is one thing, but Kentish Town, a mile or so up-river, is surely quite another?
    As a matter of fact it isn’t. Or rather, it is now, but as far as one can tell, it wasn’t in the Dark Ages, nor yet at the Norman Conquest nor yet in 1400. Until about the middle of the fifteenth century the names ‘Kentish Town’ and ‘St Pancras’ appear to have been synonymous, and either name could be used for the hamlet. Frequently on documents relating to property the place is styled ‘St Pancras alias Kentish Town’. In fact in Kentish Town we have an interesting example of a village that was apparently established in one place for a considerable period – perhaps a thousand years – and then drifted off to another locale.
    In an often-quoted passage, the late-sixteenth-century Norden wrote:
    Pancras-church standeth all alone, as utterly forsaken, old and wether-beaten, which, for the antiquitie thereof, it is thought not to yeeld to Paules in London. About this church have been many buildings now decayed, leaving poor Pancras without companie or comfort, yet it is now and then visited with Kentishtowne and Highgate, which are members thereof; but they seldome come there, for they have chapels of ease within themselves; but when there is a corpse to be interred, they are forced to leave the same within this forsaken church or church-yard, where (no doubt) it resteth as secure against the day of resurrection as if it lay in stately Paules.
    So, by the Elizabethan period, Kentish Town, with its new chapel of ease ‘within itself’ was being regarded as a separate entity. The chapel had been built some hundred years earlier, in 1449, on land given by a local landlord, Robert Warner, after some parishioners had made representations to him on the subject: evidently there was local feeling by then that the old church was now too remote from most of the currently inhabited buildings. The plot of land chosen was in the heart of the present-day Kentish Town, in the high road,