Mar 11

Shadows and Damp: the early days of The Chestnuts

Three centuries ago the trees met over the head of any traveller up Hoe Street. A time traveller from 2022 would depend on the street layout to be sure of the way – Hoe Street runs the same course, but with an unreliable surface and little lighting.  There are houses, but only a few, mostly large and set back from the road in their own grounds.  Heading north, the High Street, too, is in place, but called Marsh Street.  It, too, is fringed with substantial houses;  no market, few shops, and the marshes in the name are evident underfoot.  Further north again, Forest Road goes under the name of Clay Street.  There is farmland, claypits and, again, a few large houses.  In the hamlet that will one day be Walthamstow Village there are the first possibly-familiar buildings:  St Mary’s Church is in the right place, but with worryingly different porches and windows;  the Ancient House is there, covered in weatherboarding and with a farmyard behind.  And that’s where the shops are.

This is a world where Walthamstow is scarcely big enough to be a town.  A century before the advent of the railways, the residents of many of the substantial houses are  affluent people who have a central London home as well as a larger, weekend house a comfortable carriage ride away.  In the 1660s Samuel Pepys could set off first thing and be in Walthamstow in time for a late morning dinner with Sir William Batten.  Later in the eighteenth century there was a stage coach service to and from Bishopsgate for daily commuters.  And the poor, wanting to take goods or live animals to market could always walk along the Black Path as their ancestors had done.

Hoe Street in the 1870s – the Chestnuts is behind the trees to the left. Image courtesy of Vestry House Museum

Still relatively small – its population had risen to about 3,000 by 1800, Walthamstow was never a country backwater.    Some of the City merchants who lived in the grand houses had international business interests, and were used to dealing in property as well as in other commodities. Only a few of the richest and most influential families, such as the Conyers and the Maynards stayed in the area for several generations.  Much of the area round Hoe Street was owned by the Conyers family at this time – it was they who had built the mansion one day to be called Grosvenor House, leaving its name to Grosvenor Park Road and surviving two world wars only to be burned down, possibly by accident, in 1945.

Rich though they already were, the Conyers were not averse to lucrative property deals.  It is not  known exactly when and with whom they agreed to lease a plot of land south of their Hoe Street home, and who built the first house on the plot where the Chestnuts now stands, squeezed between a garage and a school.  But we do know that it was surrounded by a garden, orchard and farm buildings.  The first resident may have been Lancelot Staveley, a London merchant and stock holder in the East India Company.  He was very typical of the people who were to live in the substantial houses in the area – this kind of property was among the desirable status symbols made accessible by a City career, and that career often had international connections.  These were people used to travel and change, and very often the merchants either became so rich they moved on to grander surroundings than Walthamstow or their fortunes foundered and they vanished downwards in the game of City snakes and ladders   

Early maps, such as the one made for the Forbes family, do not show the Chestnuts, although these were a way of recording property owned individuals rather than providing a complete record of the area.  But there is a 1722 lease between John Conyers and an Inner Temple lawyer, Edmond Clark.  It is clear that the agreement makes official an existing state of affairs – this was a house that had been in existence for some years, and had been home to a previous Edmond Clark, by then dead.  The plot of land, or messuage, included gardens, outhouses, yard, gardens and orchards.  And the house was a substantial one with a hall, withdrawing chamber and parlour downstairs.  There was a “great” staircase and back stairs, and a kitchen, servants’ hall, wash house, brew house, dairy and coach house behind the main rooms, and a first floor with bedrooms and a garret floor above that.  The lease mentions fireplaces, panelling and tiling in the ground floor rooms – evidently a comfortable middle-sized house, just the place for a London lawyer or merchant to spend his leisure time and settle his family.  

Yet Edmond Clark soon vanishes from the record.  And in 1743 a new lease was issued between the Conyers family and Thomas and Catherine Allen, who were already living at the property.  Thomas Allen was a successful international trader, with connections with the Levant Company in Aleppo.  He is also listed as an Ottoman Merchant, doing business with the Ottoman Empire – as he was a member of the Mercers’ Company he is likely to have been importing luxury goods for the London market.  We know, too, that he held East India Company stock.  Evidently this network of trading interests was lucrative, as he could afford to build a new house on the Chestnuts site, funded by taking out a £1,600 loan secured on £1,000 of East India Company stock.   Yet Edmond Clark soon vanishes from the record.  And in 1743 a new lease was issued between the Conyers family and Thomas and Catherine Allen, who were already living at the property.  Thomas Allen was a successful international trader, with connections with the Levant Company in Aleppo.  He is also listed as an Ottoman Merchant, doing business with the Ottoman Empire – as he was a member of the Mercers’ Company he is likely to have been importing luxury goods for the London market.  We know, too, that he held East India Company stock.  Evidently this network of trading interests was lucrative, as he could afford to build a new house on the Chestnuts site, funded by taking out a £1,600 loan secured on £1,000 of East India Company stock. 

The Chestnuts in 2019

The Allens took a very expensive option.  It would have been more usual, as well as considerably cheaper, to extend and improve the existing property, but the evidence points to their deciding on an entirely new house, on the same footprint as, but bigger than, the one lived in by Edmond Clark.  The work seems to have taken nearly four years – a lead water butt  bears the inscription “T C A 1747” – the Allens’ initials and, presumably, the year of completion of their project.   It is not surprising that it took so long to create.  It is well built in the brick and the four-square style fashionable in its day.  And, although poor maintenance and changes of use have destroyed some of the internal fittings, enough remain to show that this was a high-end show house, designed to demonstrate the taste and wealth of its owners.  The “best”, mahogany staircase is as elegant now as it was nearly three centuries ago, and the plasterwork over it is wonderfully intact.  Some of the windows, fireplaces and some exquisite ceilings also survive.  And there are unexpected small treasures such as carved wooden hooks, ironwork in the stable block and, half hidden in the hedge, the original gateposts.  There is a detailed description of the house as it was in 1764 when Catherine Allen, now widowed, agreed to lease the property to Jacob Bosanquet, another East India Merchant.  Evidently Catherine had removed the furniture, probably to the house in Great Ormond Street where she now lived, but left all the fittings, and a great many pictures, for the new leaseholder.The Allens took a very expensive option.  It would have been more usual, as well as considerably cheaper, to extend and improve the existing property, but the evidence points to their deciding on an entirely new house, on the same footprint as, but bigger than, the one lived in by Edmond Clark.  The work seems to have taken nearly four years – a lead water butt  bears the inscription “T C A 1747” – the Allens’ initials and, presumably, the year of completion of their project.   It is not surprising that it took so long to create.  It is well built in the brick and the four-square style fashionable in its day.  And, although poor maintenance and changes of use have destroyed some of the internal fittings, enough remain to show that this was a high-end show house, designed to demonstrate the taste and wealth of its owners.  The “best”, mahogany staircase is as elegant now as it was nearly three centuries ago, and the plasterwork over it is wonderfully intact.  Some of the windows, fireplaces and some exquisite ceilings also survive.  And there are unexpected small treasures such as carved wooden hooks, ironwork in the stable block and, half hidden in the hedge, the original gateposts.  There is a detailed description of the house as it was in 1764 when Catherine Allen, now widowed, agreed to lease the property to Jacob Bosanquet, another East India Merchant.  Evidently Catherine had removed the furniture, probably to the house in Great Ormond Street where she now lived, but left all the fittings, and a great many pictures, for the new leaseholder.   

Detail of plasterwork on the main staircase at the Chestnuts. Photo by author

 This is the house which, battered, extended and in desperate need of care, has survived until today.  It has  many more stories to tell, some documented – some yet to be discovered.

Permanent link to this article: https://lissachapman.co.uk/walthamstow/shadows-and-damp-the-early-days-of-the-chestnuts/

Dec 14

More tales from Canterbury

We are often told that celebrity is a modern invention that came to birth with the advent of the cinema.  Or, pushing it, that Lord Byron, followed in the streets of London by adoring young women clutching copies of “Childe Harold” was the first example.  The idea that the first celebrities might have been Londoners of far longer ago, and that some of them might have been women themselves, is probably new.

For the past two years I have been spending many of my waking hours in the company of a long- dead playwright.  Aphra Behn’s name is still not as famous as it deserves to be.  She began life as the daughter of a Canterbury barber, started her career as a spy in the early years of the Restoration, became the first woman to earn her living as a writer, created and directed nineteen plays as well as poems, novels and translations, and seems to have known everyone in the London of her day.  She was never rich, but when she died, aged only forty-eight, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Aphra Behn wrote for the first generation of actresses, who were as recognisable as she on the streets of a city that was still small enough for its citizens to recognise many of their neighbours by sight. 

Aphra Behn by Peter Lely – it is likely that the management of the Duke’s Theatre commissioned the portrait

Then, as now, London was the place where the ambitious came to seek their fortunes – it was where the jobs were, and where a young population either made it or quietly vanished, either returning to the country or dying heartbreakingly early.  And the young Aphra, born Johnson, was not the only girl to find her way to London from Canterbury.  We don’t know most of their stories.  But at least one other found fame of a kind, although her story ended very differently.

Mary Moders was a couple of years younger than Aphra Johnson.  She too was part of a modest family – her father was a fiddler, and possibly also a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral.  Mary married young, taking as her husband a shoemaker called Thomas Stedman.  They had two children together – both died as babies.  And after a couple of years, Mary left for Dover, where she married a surgeon called Thomas Day.  Evidently she had not gone far enough, as she was soon recognised and, by some accounts, put on trial for bigamy.  The next we hear of Mary is in Cologne, where she evidently had a short-lived affair with a much older rich man, who wanted to marry her.  But Mary departed for England with the valuable jewellery he had given her as well as several faked letters relating to her imagined inheritance.

Back in London in 1663, Mary took up residence in the Exchange Tavern under the name of Princess van Wolway and claiming to be a German heiress.  She became engaged to a young lawyer, John Carleton, who also claimed to be heir to a fortune – in fact he was the nephew of the landlord of the Exchange.  After the hastily arranged wedding, it became clear that both were liars.  The Carleton parents became involved, and an anonymous letter writer told the story of Mary’s previous marriages – unfortunately for the Carletons they were too mean to pay the fare from Canterbury to London of the only known witness of her previous weddings.  So Mary was acquitted, and remained technically married to John Carleton, but he and his parents kept her jewellery and threw her out.

While in prison awaiting trial, Mary had become famous.   Samuel Pepys, among many others, visited her, and was impressed by her charm and wit.  Pamphlets telling her story sold well, and her admirers were relieved at her acquittal.  But she still had a living to earn.  A play about her life, “A Witty Combat, or the Female Victor” when into rehearsal at the Duke’s Theatre, and Mary accepted an invitation to appear in it as herself.  Pepys recorded having gone to see the show, but was somewhat disappointed.  Clearly Mary’s future was not likely to be on the stage.  What she seems to have done is to have a series of affairs with affluent older men, stealing money and valuables and then quietly vanishing.  Many of the men seem to have kept quiet rather than admitting to having been duped.  At least one, however, did complain, and Mary was accused of stealing several items of silver plate.  This was then a capital offence, and she was condemned to death, with the sentence being commuted to transportation to Jamaica.

The theatre in Dorset Gardens, where Aphra Behn’s plays were staged

In Jamaica, Mary worked as a prostitute for a few months.  But she appears to have persuaded a ship’s captain to take her back to London, where she was able to resume her previous activities, including making at least one more marriage – this time to a rich apothecary in Westminster, whom she soon left.   It was not until 1672 that her luck finally ran out.  She was again accused to stealing silver items and imprisoned awaiting trial in Newgate, where the turnkey recognised her as the German Princess of the previous decade. 

This time there was no escape.  Mary Carleton was condemned to death for returning early from transportation.  She was hanged at Tyburn in January 1673, making the final speech that was expected from those about to die, admitting to having been motivated by vanity, but hoping for God’s forgiveness.  Someone in her life paid for her to have a marked grave at St Michael’s Church, and within weeks an enterprising writer, Francis Kirkham, had cashed in on her death by publishing a pretended autobiography of her:  “The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled”, which, along with assorted pamphlets, sold well.

Mary Carleton, from one of the many pamphlets about her

It seems extremely likely that Aphra Behn and Mary Carleton knew of one another.  Coming from the same city, from similar backgrounds, there are some distorted similarities between the careers of the two women.  Both entered into a London adventure, launching themselves into the ferocious Restoration city that destroyed so many.  Both travelled abroad, both worked in the theatre, both attained a measure of fame.    Easy to imagine Mary Carleton on a Reality TV show in the present day – and tempting to speculate what worlds a twenty-first century Aphra Behn might inhabit.

Permanent link to this article: https://lissachapman.co.uk/aphra-behn/more-tales-from-canterbury/

Nov 01

Britain’s Moon Mission: a good blacksmith, £400 and a lot of feathers

A treble love story, music, spectacle, music, dance, stage machinery, knockabout comedy and a gullible old pseudo academic with a pretty daughter, a twenty-foot property telescope and a belief not only in the Man in the Moon but a world in the Moon.  A smash hit musical, and so far, so frothy, perhaps, viewed from 2021.  It was the last play Aphra Behn completed and had staged in her lifetime – “The Emperor of the Moon” not only attracted the crowds  in the uncertain days of  1687, but became a staple for the next half century, guaranteed to get bums on seats in atrocious weather or on a Friday 13th.  But there’s more there than froth and spectacle.

Theatre interior of 1672

This was a world where scholars were discussing the possibility that there was indeed a world in the Moon.  The Royal Society had been founded a generation before by a group including what are now famous names including Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, with Prince Rupert of the Rhine presiding.  But one of their number, eminent in his day, was one Reverend John Wilkins, who had studied both theology and natural philosophy, and who was to end his career as a Bishop.

Wilkins, born almost certainly at Canons Ashby in Northamptonshire, was the son of Walter Wilkins, a prosperous goldsmith, and Jane Dod, of a local gentry family.  Walter died when his son was a small boy, and Jane remarried a Francis Pope, going on to have more children, including another Walter, who was also to become a scientist.  John Wilkins was educated at Oxford, where he gained an MA. It was while there that he was able to view the Moon through one of the first telescopes to be set up in this country – the cutting edge technology of its day.

The now visible face of the Moon was a revelation – many serious astronomers  believed that they could see not only mountains and seas but cities.  There were suggestions that there was a whole civilisation there, waiting to be discovered, and traded with, by the citizens of Earth.  In 1620 Ben Jonson staged a Court Masque about the topic.  The fact that this was the talking point of its time is demonstrated by a first scene in which a printer, chronicler, factor (marketer) and two heralds agree that this is the latest news.  Jonson takes the view that the inhabitants of the Moon are Volatees, or birdmen.  The final section of the entertainment, led by the Prince of Wales, is largely given over to flattering King James – always the first concern of any sensible courtier.

In the following years interest in astronomy was intense.  There was as yet no formal grouping for this area of study, but not only at Oxford and Cambridge, but  in rectories up and down the land there was much thought and observation given to the Moon and the workings of the heavens.  Near Preston, the Rev’d Jeremiah Horrocks observed the transit of Venus from his garden.  And in his palace north of Cardiff, Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandaff wrote the first work of science fiction in English, “The Man in the Moon” – a glorious fantasy featuring an adventurer flown to the Moon by wild swans.  The book appears to have been a bestseller, and was probably known to Aphra Behn.

The twenty-four-year-old John Wilkins was writing his own Moon book, “The Discovery of a New World in the Moon” at much the same time.  This was, however, a very different work.  Wilkins divided his ideas into thirteen serious propositions, about the Moon itself, its nature and the nature of space.  One of them being the ringing “That a Plurality of Worlds Does Not Contradict any Principle of Reason or Faith”.   He and Robert Hooke tried to build a spaceship in the garden of Wadham College, Oxford – they reckoned they needed a skilled blacksmith and £400 for the project, along with a supply of feathers to cover the clockwork wings.   It is not known at what point they accepted that their creation was destined never to leave the ground – or what finally happened to it.

The planned space craft

Wilkins was to update his book several times in the next thirty years;  he had a successful academic and church career, holding appointments at both Oxford and Cambridge.  He married Oliver Cromwell’s sister, and so lost his Cambridge position on the Restoration, but quickly regained the lost ground – John Aubrey thought he was “no great read man, but one of much deep thinking and of a working head”.  Wilkins advocated a universal language and was one of those who, in those pre Newton days, believed that gravity was a form of magnetism.  He was a founder member of the Royal Society, and spent much of his time in London, notwithstanding his appointment as Bishop of Chester.  This was a small circle, and it is likely that he, too, was known to Aphra Behn.  Like so many others of his time Wilkins appears to have been killed by the medical treatment he was undergoing; he died in 1671, aged 58, and is buried in St Lawrence Jewry.

John Wilkins painted in c1670, possibly by Mary Beale

Permanent link to this article: https://lissachapman.co.uk/aphra-behn/britains-moon-mission-a-good-blacksmith-400-and-a-lot-of-feathers/

Aug 01

Watercress

Watercress sandwiches aren’t really a thing now.  Gone the way of cucumber with the crusts cut off, and unlikely to be included in the riverside picnic of any modern day Ratty along with the cold meats and French rolls.  No watercress for sale in the market either;  just bags in supermarket salad aisles alongside the more favoured rocket.

 Walthamstow was once famous for its watercress.  And looking at the 1822 Coe map of the area, it is easy to see why – the minutely recorded expanses of meadow are criss crossed with ponds, streams and blue shading and drawn in tufts of grass for the more notably damp meadows.  Some of the many local market gardeners had a watercress bed or two, and gathered and sold the cresses commercially.  And before the days of compulsory education, children would buy or gather watercress to sell at street corners.  The original map is in Vestry House Museum, and there is more information about the map on www.queensroadstories.org

Section of the Coe Map, courtesy of Vestry House Museum

In Henry Mayhew’s 1851 “London Labour and the London Poor”, an eight-year old interviewee was earning her own living by arriving at Farringdon Market at four in the morning, buying a supply of cress which she then tied into bunches and sold to office workers, earning a few pence profit a day.  This child had a home and family, but was dressed in a thin cotton dress and shawl in the depth of winter and subsisting on a cup of tea and two slices of bread and butter, twice a day, with a hot meal once a week.  Mayhew’s campaigning work, and in particular this child  and her poverty, became famous.  Her down to earth character and practicality come over strongly – a contrast to images such as the painting of a watercress girl by Johann Zoffany, in which the girl and her vulnerability are touching, not disturbing – poverty with a pearly complexion and in a clean dress.

We do not know anything more of Mayhew’s interviewee.  But there were many small girls with lives not unlike hers.  In Walthamstow around that time, Emily Clark and her grandmother were living in Markhouse Lane.  The grandmother was officially a pauper; by this date the elderly were often permitted to come and go from the workhouse depending on the time of year.  The two of them appear to have kept going by selling ginger beer and watercress, probably from a barrow, possibly to the commuters coming and going from Lea Bridge Station, still the only railway in the area.

Before the days of trains, many street sellers would walk from Walthamstow and Leyton to London’s more lucrative streets along the Black Path –    this was a route used by drovers on their way to the London markets with everything from cows to geese.  And even after the trains came, the path was still much used by the many who could not afford the fare.  This was long before the days of cheap workmen’s tickets, and rail travel was only for the moderately prosperous.  And this was still a generation before education for all children became compulsory, even in theory.  And in Walthamstow, when the newly created school board counted how many children needed school places, there was a shortfall of at least 1,000.  They did their best, but even once there was a school place available, many children, especially girls, were kept at home.  Some were doing the washing, some looking after younger siblings – some out selling flowers or watercress.  

Much later, after the Boer War, one young widow, a Mrs Dyson, left with small children, fought to keep her family out of the workhouse.  She went out cleaning steps, taking the baby with her.  She also gathered and sold watercress, standing on the side of the road offering bunches to passers-by, sometimes with her skirt soaked to the knees as she had come directly from gathering cress.  In the evenings she was doing piece-work for a local factory, and sewing.  They got by – she too lived mostly on tea and bread, in this generation with margarine. 

But the days of the watercress beds were numbered.  Along with the railways came exponential growth.  Between the 1860s and 1911, the population of Walthamstow doubled every ten years.  The damp meadows were built on – when young Arthur Spencer and his family moved to Longfellow Road, his first memory of their newly built house was the men coming to fill in the watercress beds.  The ponds were covered over, and the streams culverted.  In the early 1900s most people used their gardens to grow flowers or vegetables – the neglected ones reverted to the damp meadow they had always been.  But in wet weather, the water that had once ended up in streams and ponds now ran down roads and into houses – the infrastructure could not cope, several decades before the fashion for decking and astroturf arrived.

The culverted streams are still there – near the site of Arthur Spencer’s old home you can hear the running water, especially after heavy rain.  But such watercress as is sold locally is bought in from elsewhere.

Permanent link to this article: https://lissachapman.co.uk/walthamstow/watercress/

May 22

The Plague Pit: myth, memory or tall tale?

Plenty of  stories out there to choose from, of course – from the Romans leaving the country in two straight, orderly lines in 410, to the dream of crime and conflict free unity in the Blitz.  And a rich selection of people glossed over with layers of storytelling, from the Princes in the Tower to Jack the Ripper.     The same turns out to go for local history.  Some themes are everywhere:  underground tunnels.  Lost Roman villas.   Visiting monarchs, Elizabeth I or Charles II for preference.  And plague pits. 

Specifically, at this precise moment, a plague pit claimed to be in Walthamstow.  On the face of it, nothing too unlikely about that.  St Mary’s, Walthamstow has been a parish church for nearly a thousand years, although little remains of the building that was created in the time of Ralph de Toni, standard bearer of William the Conqueror, in around 1108.  In the centuries since, the church has been added to, upgraded, knocked about in wars, locked up, opened up and repeatedly reimagined – it emerged from the Second World War shorn of most of its south aisle.  However, it is surrounded by what is now sometimes referred  to as “the church campus” – a graveyard as old as the parish, with a former school building dating from 1828, the site of the original vicarage, many times rebuilt, and the almshouses first endowed by Sir George Monoux, the Tudor merchant and Lord Mayor of London who settled locally and who also founded a school and funded extensive rebuilding of the church where his memorial still survives.

St Mary’s Churchyard, image courtesy of Vestry House Museum

The street layout around St Mary’s remains, give or take a few recent incursions by the local authority, much as it has been for several centuries, although many of the names have changed.  Orford Road, for example, has skirted what used to be the common land for at least four hundred years, but only acquired its present name in the eighteenth century.  And the iconic Ancient House, star of so many photographs and watercolours, itself fifteenth century and the site of an earlier manor house, passed several centuries covered in utilitarian weatherboarding and serving as several shops and a café.   The romantic name started to be used after the building was saved from collapse and restored by a local builder. 

Another name, less romantic, has a story attached:  Vinegar Alley runs along the periphery of the churchyard.  Over recent years several claims have appeared on websites that this is because the lane runs alongside a burial site associated with the Great Plague.  Some of the sites go on to describe dead bodies being brought in carts from London to Walthamstow in 1665, and the name Vinegar Abbey deriving from attempts to disinfect the area with vinegar.  A graphic and memorable story.    

The 1665 plague killed at least 68,000 Londoners, a figure that may well be an underestimate.  Serious attempts were made to contain the infection, with houses being placed in quarantine if one inhabitant become ill.  The dead were collected at night;  bodies were loaded onto carts and, as the epidemic continued, buried with little ceremony in pits on the outskirts of the city.  Multiple burials have been located, and sometimes excavated, at Aldgate, Houndsditch and Bishopsgate, among many others.  Attempts were evidently made to bury the dead in, or close to, consecrated ground, although this became difficult as the outbreak spread.   Daniel Defoe was five years old at the time of the Great Plague.  His “Journal of the Plague Year” is a work of imagination, yet he was a Londoner with relatives who survived the epidemic.  Some of the records were destroyed in the Great Fire of the following year, but the burial grounds were there for all to see, including the Great Pit described in the book as being located at the edge of the graveyard of St Botolph without Aldgate.   When Aldgate Station was created in the 1870s, human remains were discovered, although it remains unclear whether the bones were those of Plague victims.   All the evidence, however, is that London plague victims were buried as close as possible to where they died.

Woodcut from a 1665 newsletter

In 1665, as in other plague years – about one summer in ten claimed a significant number of victims – towns outside London did their best to avoid infection.  However little was known of the exact way the disease was carried, no one was in doubt that it was dangerous to come into contact with a sufferer or their possessions.  Elizabeth I had taken refuge from the plague at Windsor one hot summer, and decrees forbade anyone travelling from London to Windsor;  transgressors were hanged without trial.   And, famously, at Eyam in Derbyshire in 1665, the community agreed to isolate themselves to protect others once the infection arrived in their midst in a parcel of patterns sent from London. 

Between those extremes, people did their best.  Walthamstow was a small place, a series of hamlets connected by lanes.  In the Tudor period only around 100 people lived there;  most worked on the land – there were rich meadows, hop fields and at least one mill.  By 1679, a few years after the plague, there were 189 buildings, so it is realistic to imagine a population of perhaps 500.  We do not know with certainty whether the plague reached there in 1665 – there is a story that local people stood guard at the ferry so as to deny entry to London refugees, but there would of course have been nothing to stop the determined and the desperate from making their way across the marshes.  It is true that vinegar was used for disinfecting purposes at this time, and the claim is that quantities of it were used to ward off infection from the corpses thrown into a nearby mass burial site.  Sadly for that theory, the name Vinegar Alley appears to date only from the late eighteenth century.  At that time Beulah Road and the surrounding area were home to the main industrial and commercial premises for Walthamstow, and these included a leatherworker whose trade would certainly have included the use of much vinegar. 

There is also a claim that errant plague pit was actually some distance away, and was disturbed at the time of the creation of the Chingford Line in 1870.  The land to make the line was part of the Berryfields, some of which was inclosed and sold to the railway company by the Vestry (the predecessor to the Council).  It was indeed common at this time for work on the new railway lines to unearth burials;  the remains were routinely reinterred.  There does not, however, appear to be any evidence for this.  There is a blue plaque on the former Sorting Office recording that the playground opposite was once part of the Berryfields.  But nothing about bones. 

It is of course impossible to be sure.  Some myths and legends have their roots in historical fact.  Only a couple of years ago archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Roman settlement only metres from St Mary’s church: no one appears to have known.  And sometimes the unfeasibly unlikely happens:  Richard III’s remains being dug up intact in a Leicester carpark would be unbelievable if it had not happened.  Far less likely than a plague pit in an old churchyard.   

Permanent link to this article: https://lissachapman.co.uk/walthamstow/the-plague-pit-myth-memory-or-tall-tale/

Feb 06

The quietest millionaire?

“A respected benefactress” – the bonneted  shade of Miss Elizabeth Cass might be forgiven a wry smile at our expense.  She and her equally well regarded sister Phebe have given posterity the slip, and got clean away, thanked, and unchallenged, although their weed-choked memorial would hardly please them.

Elizabeth Cass lived in one of Walthamstow’s grandest houses at a time when this was still a small country town, and when Orford Road was still known as Church Common Road .  Orford House is still standing, although its elegant white frontage is so far back from Orford Road that many people walk past without realising it is there.  A stuccoed two storey, gracious “gentleman’s residence”, the third house on the site, it was built in around 1801 – and it seems lost without its surroundings of gardens, stables, meadowland and ornamental pond.  This was a neighbourhood popular with merchants and bankers who had made a fortune in the City and wanted space, healthy air and a desirable residence in its own grounds, all within easy reach of their places of work.  Hoe Street, Marsh Street (now the High Street) and the area round St Mary’s church were fringed with substantial houses. 

Orford house – the central range, still much as it was in Elizabeth Cass’s time

Externally, Orford House remains much as it was when Elizabeth and Phebe Cass lived there.  Socially they must have settled well into the neighbourhood, differing from their affluent neighbours only in that these were two single women running their own lives.  Internally one of the few features remaining from their time is the elegant cantilevered staircase.  This was a house that took several servants to maintain:  some, including a long-serving housekeeper, are remembered in the will of Elizabeth Cass.  We know, too, that the many rooms were expensively fitted out with  luxury items such as silver tea sets, jugs and candlesticks, as well as gilt looking glasses and opulent furnishings.  This was only a small part of the property owned by the Cass sisters, who lived in Orford House only in the last years of their lives.  There were several other freehold and leasehold houses in Walthamstow, some but not all inherited from their father.    These women were not merely prosperous, but rich.  Orford House in their day was smaller, without its eastern extension.  It would, however, have provided a generous home for two ladies and their servants.  We know that both sisters were devout, with Bibles and prayer books precious enough to be left as bequests, as are items of embroidery equipment and some of the work they produced.

Their parents, John and Phebe Cass, had moved to Walthamstow from Whitechapel where they retained business links and a house.  This John Cass was descended from a cousin of “the” Sir John Cass who left his fortune to maintain the school for poor London children he and his wife had founded.  Famously, Cass died suddenly in 1718, before he could sign every page of his newly redrafted will, and it took thirty years to settle the legal case that dragged on between the those who wanted to see his wishes carried out and the “heirs at law” – relatives who wanted his fortune for themselves.    Interestingly, though, there is evidence that the network of cousins evidently stayed in touch and took an interest and pride in the Cass school.  This went on being the case for many years – however, the court case dragged on well into the lifetime of the John Cass who moved into Walthamstow and who was born in 1732, and the case was not resolved until 1748.   It becomes less surprising, then, that his daughter Elizabeth left some of her fortune to Sir John Cass’s school, and to the other charities he had favoured. 

Sir John Cass had been an only child, son of Thomas Cass who had made a fortune from the rebuilding of London in the aftermath of the 1666 fire.  He was  himself the son of an innkeeper, yet another John Cass, possibly of French descent.  Sir John Cass was a highly successful City businessman and politician.  He was an MP, alderman, liveryman of both the Carpenters and then the more prestigious Skinners Company.  He was also one of the many City businessmen of his day who invested in the Royal African Company, whose main activity was slave trading – more than that, he served on the ruling Court of the company in an attempt to bring them back into profit after Bristol had become the British hub of the slave trade.  Ironically, although Cass held £5,000-worth of stock in the Royal African Company, it appears that the dividends he received over a period of years added up to less than £200, a drop in the ocean in terms of a fortune that ran into millions.  This is not to obscure the fact that Cass, and his City colleagues, would have been more than happy to take any money from slavery that was on offer.  The reality, however, is that the money that went to set up the Cass Foundation was overwhelmingly derived from building and rents. 

Two generations on, the Cass cousins who had failed to hijack the fortune of Sir John Cass, and their descendants, had not been idle, and were certainly a part of the City of London.  A Mary Cass was a glover (at this time women could trade in their own right);  a John Cass of the next generation, perhaps her son, was her apprentice, and later became a haberdasher.    Clearly the  money-making gene was a dominant one in the Cass family.  The John Cass who moved to  Walthamstow was a wealthy man who left his daughters a fortune in property and stocks and shares.  He evidently also left them the confidence and knowledge to operate in the business world for themselves:  there are records of a number of court cases in which Phebe and Elizabeth Cass took action over matters relating to their property portfolio.   The family retained their house in Whitechapel – Elizabeth paid the insurance for it in her final year – and it seems likely that they continued to think of this as their main home. 

When Elizabeth Cass made her will she was able to make bequests to over  a dozen charities.  Most of these were for £3,000 or £4,000 (multiply by at least 200 for a present-day value) , and this does not take into account the value of her freehold properties or the contents of her house.  In Walthamstow there are bequests of £500 to a local school, and £4,000 to be invested and the income used for the local poor, stipulating beneficiaries should be of good character and should be members of the Church of England.  A small sum was to be put aside each year for the maintenance of the Cass family grave, and £30 earmarked to be given annually to the vicar and churchwardens for their trouble in administering the bequest.  However, the bulk of the legacies were made to London charities, including not only those favoured by Sir John Cass but a number of others including a home for female orphans.   Elizabeth also left annuities, mostly of £50 a year (an adequate but not generous income), to several cousins and former servants, with careful instructions that the money should be paid only to the intended recipient and no one else:  not unusual at this time when it was not unknown for attempts to be made to “sell on” the right to an annuity. 

The Cass memorial in the graveyard of St Mary’s, Walthamstow

All the instructions appear to have been honestly carried out for nearly two centuries.  Elizabeth shares the grave of her parents and sister as she wished.  The inscription, almost certainly chosen by her executors, records her as “a liberal benefactress to many charitable institutions, but especially to the parochial schools and the poor of this parish”.  They credit her with having lived a “truly Christian life and died in hope of a better world”.  It is a sadness, though, to record that Elizabeth Cass’s Walthamstow charity was dissolved as recently as 2017, and, looking at the present state of the Cass family memorial in the churchyard of St Mary’s Walthamstow  it looks as if it has suffered from several years of neglect.  Ivy has grown over it, and the only inscription that is currently decipherable is that of Elizabeth’s sister Phebe.  Organised as well as kindly people, they would certainly resent it.

The inscription commemorating Phebe Cass – the only part of the tomb currently visible

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Dec 29

Annie West: The Saddest Christmas Shadow

Annie West only lived to be ten.  Her unmarked grave, shared with eleven others including five babies, is in Queen’s Road Cemetery, Walthamstow;  the plot was resold many years ago.  In the final decades of the nineteenth century, when Annie lived and died, it was all too common for families to lose a child, sometimes several.  In those days before antibiotics, not only TB but any winter cough could be a killer, and a “delicate” child was often “not long for this world”.

Annie West’s burial appears on this page. The plot was resold in 1936

But Annie was fit and well, the eldest of six children of Richard West, a respectable working man with a steady job as a stoker at the local gas works and his wife Sarah.  Then she ran out of her home on Boxing Day 1892.  Her frozen body was found beside a ditch less than half a mile away the next day.  And her inquest, held over two weeks in January 1893, attracted national publicity, local gossip, the attentions of the newly formed National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a false confession of murder – and public vilification of Sarah West, who was blamed as being “morally if not legally” responsible for her daughter’s death. 

The known facts are these.  Annie left the house in a hurry on the evening of Boxing Day, without a coat, hat or warm shoes.  Her mother claimed that she had believed Annie had only gone outside for some coal for the fire.    But Annie spent the next few hours walking the local streets, telling her friend Ada Lebern, whom she met by chance, that she did not want to go home.  Ada gave Annie an orange to try to cheer her up.  It was found still in her pocket after she died.  Annie talked about sleeping in the dog’s kennel at home, but after she and Ada parted company she set off in the opposite direction in the bitter weather, towards Low Hall Farm, and it was there, beside a ditch, that her frozen body was found the next day.

About three in the afternoon of 27th December a passer-by at Low Hall Farm saw a group of boys “looking at something in the ditch” – going to investigate, he discovered Annie’s body, kneeling face downwards in the ditch, with an orange in her apron pocket.  A policeman was called and took the body to the mortuary at Queen’s Road, where it was examined by a local doctor, who noted that the corpse was so frozen he had difficulty in making his examination.  The policeman was to say at the inquest that there was no sign of a struggle at the spot;  the doctor was clear that there was no water in Annie’s lungs;  he was sure she had frozen to death in the temperature of the previous night.

Annie’s funeral took place on 4th January – perhaps at St Saviour’s Church in Markhouse Road where she had been christened nine years before.  The burial was in a shared grave where there were to be eleven other burials in all, including five babies.  This was the common practise of the time, and the fact that the burials were in unconsecrated ground reflects simply that this was in the part of the cemetery that was opened to Nonconformist as well as Anglican burials.  The register entry tells us, too, that the plot was resold some forty years later, in the 1930s.  This, too, was routinely done with “common” graves.


Markhouse Road with St Saviour’s Church in 1914

All this was before the media circus got going.  All inquests were fully reported in the local press, with the statements of witnesses and the coroner being printed verbatim.  This one did the 1890s equivalent of going viral as the circumstances became known.  At an early stage the Coroner stated that “some man had given himself up to the police, and alleged that he had caused the death of the child….. he had only been discharged from a lunatic asylum on the previous Sunday…a man who had given himself up for various offences”.  However unfounded in fact, this was, however, a promising piece of fuel to feed the media frenzy.  Only four years after the last of the so-called “Jack the Ripper” killings, whose coverage had sold many newspapers, a new murder did wonders for a paper’s circulation.   Depressingly, at least one recent writer has suggested that this unfortunate man drowned Annie, despite the fact that she was not drowned and he was nowhere near at the time of her death. 

And in the absence of a murderer,  Sarah West was vilified.  The standards of her day required a pregnant mother of six children under ten to be “grateful”, as one juror put it, that her husband “entrusted” money to her to feed the family, and him.  No matter that Richard West habitually came home from work only to barricade himself in the quietest room to sleep until his next shift.  He had worked through Christmas night, slept through Boxing Day, waking at five in the afternoon to discover the children had not had their dinner, which was spoiling in the oven.  In the course of the inquest it emerged that Annie had run away from home on four previous occasions, and the police had brought her back.  Nothing had been done to support the obviously struggling family.  Neighbours had known all was not well;  one claimed that Sarah was often drunk, and would quarrel with Annie, turning her out of the house.  The Coroner claimed “Mrs West’s conduct is most reprehensible”, and after the verdict of death as a result of exposure had been returned, he proceeded to abuse her in Court.  

The case had been reported nationally, and must have been the talk of Walthamstow as well as filling many column inches in the “Walthamstow and Leyton Guardian” for three consecutive weeks.  It is hard to imagine how the West family dealt with their notoriety.  They did indeed move house, but only about half a mile to Cambridge Road,  a turning off Boundary Road, long demolished.  The press coverage died down, leaving a flotsam of sentimental poetry and an outraged letter or two;  if any report was made by the NSPCC inspector who had apparently attended the whole inquest then it has vanished, as there is nothing on file. 

It seems, then, that for the West family life returned to some kind of “normal”.  They had two more children after Annie’s death.  In 1911 Sarah West listed that she had had a total of eight children, of whom five were alive.  At the time of the 1911 census Richard and Sarah were living in Netley Road, with only one of their surviving children.  Another, Amy, was living with her uncle Edmund in Leytonstone – evidently the West family was on sufficiently good terms for this arrangement.

Of Annie’s surviving brothers and sisters, we know that Edmund, who had shared her christening, joined the Essex Regiment during the First World War, and was killed in action on 4th January 1918, leaving a widow.  The youngest sister, Alice, had been born in 1897, five years after Annie’s death.  Alice apparently went through life unaware that Annie had ever lived.   Given that some at least of her older brothers and sisters would certainly have remembered Annie, the West household must have been one of gaping silences, perhaps especially at Christmas.

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Dec 02

About a Girl: Rachel Harriet Gravestock

The face under the boater would look more at home in some shadowy corner of the Escorial Palace than in that slightly unkempt garden in Edwardian Berkhamsted, so perhaps the legend is true after all.  My mother had a store of stories about her ancestors, some more likely than others, but this was the one she returned to most.

Pregnant housemaids were an all too common fact of Victorian life.  Rachel Harriet Gravestock was far from being the only one.  She was born in 1834, daughter of James, a gardener, and Rachel Rebecca, a straw plaiter.  At  the time of his daughter’s birth James worked for the Rector of Berkhamsted, The Rev John Crofts, denounced as a vandal for demolishing the Old Rectory and the equally ancient walnut tree in its garden.  James was descended from a numerous family of paupers who had come to Berkhamsted in the 1790s, been hastily baptised and found parish apprenticeships.  He did relatively well in life, becoming a skilled gardener, moving jobs only once in fifty years, when he moved a few hundred years up the high street to become head gardener at the Red House.

Rachel Harriet was born into a world which offered few opportunities to daughters of poor families – it was to be nearly another half century before all children went to school, and even then, for many it merely put off unskilled labour for a few years.  The railway age had begun – work was just starting on the line that was one day to help transform Berkhamsted into a glossily prosperous commuter town – and the canal age had boosted the local economy as it had others.  But for a gardener’s daughter in the 1830s the choices were essentially domestic service or straw plaiting.  And the 1841 census lists her, aged seven, living with her grandmother and aunt and already working as a straw plaiter as they did.  It was to be some years before any other children of the marriage are listed, but by 1851 there were three little girls at home.  

Rachel Harriet was not with them.  Like many others before and since, she was working in London, now much more easily accessible, growing hugely  and offering immense numbers of jobs for servants – especially young ones who could be paid low wages.  By these early Victorian  years it had become de rigueur for any middle class London household to employ at least one servant, generally a teenager, who would usually be expected to undertake all the housework, most of the cooking, work six and a half days a week and all for perhaps twenty pounds a year.   There were, however, many jobs available, and there was an understood hierarchy in terms of how desirable a “place”  might be, with those requiring a sole general servant in a small house in a less-than-grand area at the bottom of the pile.  And that is where Rachel Harriet found herself:  working for a railway overlooker (supervisor), his wife, nephew and lodger in one of the new streets north of St Pancras station.  Perhaps the family was kind and she was happy there, but the work must certainly have been hard and the pay almost certainly low.

We do not know in what circumstances Rachel Harriet’s London adventure came to an end.  But we do know that in 1856, at the age of twenty-two,  she gave birth, in Berkhamsted, to a son, Harry.  All that is officially known of the circumstances is the bleak “father unknown” that appears on his birth certificate.   James and Rachel Rebecca took the child, only a couple of years younger than their own only son, to bring up as their own, believing his grandparents were his parents and his mother, his sister.  Family legend credited him with a Spanish sea captain for a father, and it is true that one of his descendants inherited a ring which has proved to be of Spanish origin.  And it would explain his son’s face.  And his grandson’s.  

Rachel Harriet herself was not thrown out to starve.  1861 found her working as a housemaid for her father’s employers, the Robinson family, at the Red House, Berkhamsted.  This job was many steps more desirable than the one at St Pancras, as Rachel Harriet was now one of seven indoor servants, and her employer a respected iron master.   Ten years later still, in 1871, she was employed as a cook – the top of the service tree – by the Harmer family in Chesham. 

The next year, Rachel Harriet married a Chesham brush maker named Moulder, and went on to have four children with him.  Harry remained with his grandparents in Berkhamsted, became a prosperous printer, married a farmer’s daughter, Rosina Lismer, and had four daughters and two sons.  We do not know what he was finally told about his parentage, but when his son, Ernest, asked him for the truth Harry flew into a towering rage and cut Ernest out of his will.

Harry, Rosina and Rosina’s sister Annie Lothian are buried in the cemetery at Three Close Lane – their memorial is near the main path.

Words and images are copyright of Lissa Chapman and may not be reproduced or edited without permission. 

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Oct 19

“Born deaf and dumb”

In most ways the Stutter family of Walthamstow were as ordinary-seeming as the thousands of others who had moved into the newly completed housing in the Queen’s Road area.  A decent three-bedroom house with a good garden, a range and a scullery could be rented for around 2s 6d a week, with easy access to the station.  But one thing stands out in their 1901 census return: the eldest son of the family is listed as “deaf and dumb”.  In all other respects this was a very typical family, who had moved to Walthamstow from Bethnal Green.  The father of the family, a silk spinner called William Stutter, had been working as a tassel maker in his teens, living with his widowed mother Jane, a laundress.  He had married – he and his wife Sarah had three daughters and two sons

In 1901 the census did not record very much information:  in each household the name, age, marital status and occupation of every resident is listed, along with any relationship to the “head” –  endless lists of clerks, shop keepers, their wives and children.  But there is one more column on the page – the one which records disabilities.  The possibilities are printed on the form – deaf and dumb, blind, lunatic or imbecile.  The Victorian language seems brutal today, but was regarded as merely descriptive at the time.  In the early days of compulsory education it was far from clear whether the new board schools should provide for children with disabilities. 

Queen’s Road School Cookery Centre in c1905

We know a little of the younger William Stutter’s story.  His family had come to live just round the corner from Walthamstow’s first-ever specialist deaf teaching unit, itself part of the newly opened Queen’s Road school, a custom built showplace incorporating provision for over 1,400 girls, boys and infants, with dedicated classrooms for cookery and laundry.  The new Education Act required local authorities to provide specialist teaching for children with what would now be termed special needs, and the Walthamstow School Board took steps to find out how many children in the area needed specialist teaching.  One of the results was the unit at Queen’s Road, which opened with sixteen children, girls and boys of assorted ages – and one of them was William Stutter.

Specialist teaching for the deaf was not new:  there had been a school in Yorkshire by the 1760s, set up for the deaf children of prosperous families and teaching finger signing alongside reading and writing.  Other, church-funded schools followed, intended to teach deaf children to read so they would have a religious education.  At this time deafness was often not diagnosed until a child was two or three and had failed to learn to speak.  There were many different causes, including scarlet fever and mumps.  It was, however, accepted that a deaf child could be educated and learn a skill – one report of the 1870s advocated this both for the sake of the children themselves and so that they should not grow up to be a burden on their parish. 

Deaf children and their teacher at William Morris School c1910

By the early 1900s sign language was out of favour, and deaf children were banned from using it.  The emphasis was on their learning to read and write, to lip read and, in some cases, to speak.  When the Queen’s Road unit was inspected, it was given a good report, although the inspector thought that the pupils should be encouraged in the direction of out-door occupations on farms and in market gardens as well as boot-making for boys and laundry work for girls, which suggests that expectation for the pupils’ academic attainment was not high.  It is true, however, that expectations for hearing working class children of the time were not very different.

 The Stutter family did not stay long in Walthamstow – by the time of the 1911 census they had long moved away. Perhaps William Senior could not get work locally.  It looks, though, as if William the younger did well in life:  in 1939 he was married, living in Ilford and working as a railway inspector. For other deaf children in the area, provision did improve:  after a few years a well-equipped permanent classroom for twenty pupils and their teacher was opened in the William Morris School in Gainsford Road and the unit moved.  By the 1960s it was in Chingford.  Then and for several more decades, in Waltham Forest as elsewhere,  teaching was aimed at teaching deaf children to speak.   It would be interesting to know what became of the rest of William Stutter’s class.

Copyright Lissa Chapman 2019  

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Sep 18

Christopher Urswick

Christopher Urswick probably counted on modest posthumous fame. That memorial brass didn’t come cheap, and he wouldn’t have bargained for the elaborately decorated chantry chapel at Windsor being taken over for a princess’s tomb in future years. But pragmatists make bargains, and he had given up the exposed heights of political influence for the relative safety of semi retirement in the green fields of Hackney. So has had to settle for mentions in footnotes and bit part appearances in plays. And perhaps he would have settled for a road and a school in his adopted home town.

Like so many of the smartest operators in the Tudor world, the ones who were lucky enough, as well as wily enough, to live out their natural lifespan, Urswick appears to have stayed, for much of his career, out of the limelight.

Born in 1448 in Furness, both Urswick’s parents were lay members of the Abbey their ancestors had helped to found. Christopher probably went to school there before going on to Cambridge and ordination. As a young priest, he made the contact that was to change his life: an introduction to Margaret Beaufort, who offered him the position of chaplain in her household.

Margaret Beaufort had had a less than straightforward start in life. Heiress to the Duke of Somerset and descendant of Edward III, at the age of twelve she was married off. The choice of husband was that of the king, Henry VI, who was seeking a rich and aristocratic wife for his half brother, Edmund Tudor, son of his widowed mother’s scandalous remarriage to one of her own household. After her early death, Henry VI brought his half siblings to court and treated them with affection. But at the time of Margaret’s pathetically early marriage, one of the recurrent upheavals that future centuries were to call the Wars of the Roses broke out. The child bride’s husband, fighting for the Lancastrian cause, was imprisoned and then died of plague, and Margaret was left a pregnant widow at thirteen. Both Margaret and her baby survived the traumatic circumstances and difficult birth – but despite two more marriages she would bear no more children. Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry were to be close allies for all of both their lives, despite not meeting for long periods in the days before, against immense odds, he became king.

By the time Christopher Urswick took on his new role, Margaret Beaufort had married into the Stanley family, and her son Henry Tudor was in exile in Brittany. Edward IV had succeeded in keeping himself and his Yorkist faction in power for over a decade, had married Elizabeth Woodville and had, with her, become the father of a reassuringly large family of two surviving sons and five daughters. For as long as he lived, life in England was on a relatively even keel. But in 1483 the king died of a chill taken when he was out fishing, leaving a teenaged heir. Within weeks the faction fighting that had never been far under the surface was back. This time the two sides were fighting over who would control the young king. The events of the next months have become notorious: Edward IV’s younger brother, Richard of Gloucester, successfully argued that his brother’s marriage had not been lawful and his children illegitimate. The young Edward V and his brother soon vanished. Richard III is usually held to have had them murdered, but whether they really were killed and if so by whom has never been resolved.

As chaplain to the mother of the closest Lancastrian claimant to the throne and wife of a close ally of the new king, Urswick had a ringside seat for the tumultuous events of the next few years. Richard III was desperate to eliminate Henry Tudor, currently in exile in Brittany, by any means possible as well as to propitiate his own faction. Behind the scenes, Margaret Beaufort was in touch with the dowager queen Elizabeth Woodville, negotiating to arrange a marriage between their respective children, Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York. Trusted chaplains were often employed as go-betweens, and it fell to Christopher Urswick to travel to Brittany as negotiator and to warn Henry of the danger he was in. From escaping from Brittany with five attendants, Henry was soon at the head of a mercenary army of French soldiers and planning to take the throne of England.

Christopher Urswick was present on the march through Wales and then England to meet the army of Richard III and present at the close-fought Battle of Bosworth, decided largely because Margaret Beaufort’s husband William Stanley, prudently waiting until the last minute to make sure he was backing the winning side, brought his 800 armed men in to fight for Henry on the day of the battle. Loyalty was a scarce commodity around kings and courts, and the new Henry VII appreciated it in Urswick, appointing him as almoner and loading him with an almost embarrassing number of appointments and rewards. He was, among other things, Dean at Windsor, where he created a chantry chapel which still exists, complete with the inscription asking for visitors to pray for the king, for Urswick and for anyone he might have offended.

Map of the Parish of Hackney, surveyed by John Rocque (c.1709-1762) 1745 (litho) by English School, (18th century); Private Collection;

Evidently Urswick tired of life at court. Among the multiplicity of deaneries, rectories and benefits of all kinds he acquired was the rectory of Hackney – on its own a decent living, valued at a goodly £35 a year in 1535. It was a sinecure rectory, which meant that the rector was not expected to do any of the work of the “cure of souls” – he appointed a vicar for that, at his own cost. But Urswick was to take an interest in local life, helping to restore the church (all that is now left is the church tower, as the rest of the mediaeval church was to be demolished after the new St John’s church was built in the 1790s). It is likely, too, that he helped to finance the building of the church house, on the site of what was to become the town hall, a building whose future is currently unclear. The vicar’s house was on a site north of the church, near where a Celtic cross now stands. And the rector’s own house was on the other site of Mare Street (then Church Street) – originally a mediaeval hall house, it is likely the Urswick improved it, adding chimneys and expensive brick external walls.

It is likely that Christopher Urswick had become disenchanted not only with life at court but with the new mood of anticlericalism that was blowing in from northern Europe. It is possible, too, that once Henry VIII became king in 1509 he did not care for those he brought with him. Too astute to fall out either with the king or with the higher echelons of the church, the Rector of Hackney gradually gave up most of his other appointments, busying himself mostly with local concerns and with correspondence. A friend of both Erasmus and Thomas More, Urswick lived out what appears to have been a peaceful old age. Evidently kindly as well as prosperous, he helped out the chronically impecunious Erasum with the (substantial) price of a new horse at least once. When Urswick finally died, probably in 1520, his will makes it clear he had kept up his interest in national affairs while concerning himself with his locality and servants – among many small bequests is 6s 8d to an “old poor man” who regularly walked over from Kentish Town to visit. Like other high status Tudors, Christopher Urswick habitually stamped his coat of arms over anything he influenced. But he added the three letters “MIA” for Misericordia – compassion. It seems to have been appropriate.

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