The second of a series of guest posts by Wembley History Society member, Philip
Grant.
Welcome to Part 2 of
this weekly journey through the story of our local country park. If you missed
Part 1, you can read it here.
1. An autumn view across the fields to
Gotfords Hill, with Kingsbury beyond.
We had reached the late
16th century, and the map of Kingsbury made for All Souls College in 1597. The extract below marks Hill Farm, on Salmon Street, and shows the
trackway separating Harrow from Kingsbury near the top, Kingsbury Road winding
its way down the righthand side, and Church Lane (with “Fryarne f. Howse”, or Fryent Farm)
at the bottom. You can see the fields as they were at that time, edged green
for meadows and brown for ploughed fields where the farmers grew crops, as well
as the wooded areas.
2. Part of the 1597 Hovenden Map of
Kingsbury. (© The Warden and Fellows of
All Souls College, Oxford)
A number of scattered
fields on the map show “Mr Skidmore” as the tenant. Thomas Scudamore, who lived
at Kingsbury Green, was another interesting character remembered at Old
St Andrew’s Church.
[Click on the link to discover more about its fascinating history.]
“Wid. Lion” was the
tenant of a group of fields at the top right corner of the map. John Lyon of
Preston was a wealthy farmer who had died in 1592, leaving money in trust for
the maintenance of local roads, and to provide free grammar schooling for boys
in Harrow. The school has become famous, as he allowed the trustees to charge
fees, to educate “foreigners” from outside the parish. He had land in Harrow, including on Preston Eastfield, as
well as 116 acres in Kingsbury, which his widow, Joan, continued to farm until
her death in 1608.
On the Harrow side of
Eldestrete in the 1590s, there were troubled times at Uxendon Manor Farm, the home of the Bellamy family. They had remained Roman Catholics,
despite this branch of Christianity being outlawed in England under Queen
Elizabeth I. Some members of the family had already been fined, imprisoned or
executed for hiding Catholic priests before Robert Southwell was arrested in their house in 1592. Richard Bellamy
and his family spent time in prison, and the cost of the fines meant them giving up
Uxendon Manor to the Page family.
3. Robert Southwell, in a print from a
1630 book.
Southwell’s fate was
worse. He was held in the Tower of London for three years, and tortured to try and force a confession for plotting against the Queen, before
he was executed for treason, simply for being a Catholic priest. Who would have
imagined then, that four centuries later he would have been declared a saint,
with a school named after him on the other side of what would become Fryent Country Park?
Richard Page of Uxendon
also found himself in the middle of conflict in the 1640s. He was an officer in
the Royalist army during the English Civil War, and was knighted by King
Charles I after his efforts at the second Battle of Newbury in 1644. After the
King was executed, Sir Richard went into exile, and was married at The Hague in
1651, where the future Charles II had his court at the time. After the
Restoration, Uxendon Manor remained in the Page family.
We have details of the
farms in Kingsbury around 1730, from a document produced for the Duke of
Chandos, which is now in the London Metropolitan Archives. Chandos was a
politician and landowner, who had made a fortune from the public offices he
held, and spent huge amounts on his home at Canons in Stanmore. He held some
tenancies, under another of his titles, Lord Carnarvon, and may have been
looking for the chance to add more!
Lord Carnarvon had an
interest in a house and orchard, probably Bush Farm house. The unnamed
adjoining farm of 47 acres is listed as a separate letting to Elizabeth
Sarsbury, for ’21 years from Lady day
1722’. 34 acres of this were meadow, comprising Great Oldfield (‘with a barn in itt’), Little Oldfield, Great
and Little Faytes, Great Cherrylands and Honey Slough. Two other fields, Little
Cherrylands and Gaffers (Gotfords) Hill, totalling 13 acres, are described as ‘arrable’.
4. Looking across Faytes and
Cherrylands fields. (A Barn Hill Conservation Group postcard from the 1980s)
In and around the
fields of this small farm were 19 acres of hedges and woods, including ‘one
parcel almost round Honey Slough – 3 acres, 3 roods and 22 perchs’ (almost four
acres). This was part of 55 acres of woodland in Kingsbury let separately to
John Haley, the tenant of Hill Farm. His large farm had 107 acres of fields, 79
acres of meadow and 28 acres of ploughed land, in addition to the house,
barnyard, garden and orchards.
The agricultural
revolution of the late 18th century saw the invention of new farm
machinery. Kingsbury’s heavy clay soil was not suitable for these modern arable
methods, and even more of the fields became pasture land. Most of these meadows
were used for growing hay. Long grass was cut in the summer, then dried and
stored in large stacks, for sale as animal feed throughout the year. London,
the rapidly growing capital only a few miles away, was home to thousands of
horses, both for riding and for pulling carriages and carts. Kingsbury’s
farmers sent their wagons up to the Hay Market, near Piccadilly, with food for
the city’s horses, and came back with loads of dung from the stables to
fertilise their fields.
5. Hay wagons at Pipers Field, 1930. (Photo
by Stanley Holliday, from the W.H.S. Collection, Brent Archives)
Hay continued to be the
main farming crop in Kingsbury well into the twentieth century, as the
photograph above shows. But that is jumping forward - I will take up our
country park’s story, from the late 1700s, next weekend. As before, if you want to ask any questions, or add
some information, please leave a comment below.
Philip Grant
LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES
