236 LONDON PARKS & GARDENS 



Fickett's Field or Croft. It was built in 1687, Fickett's 

 Fields occupied a wider area, and until 1620 they, like 

 the larger Fields, were a place of execution. The site of 

 New Square was planted and laid out in very early days. 

 The Knights of St. John in 1376 made it into a walking 

 place, planted with trees, for the clerks, apprentices, and 

 students of the law. In 1399 a certain Roger Legit was 

 fined and imprisoned for setting mantraps with a " mali- 

 cious intention to maim the said clerks and others," as 

 they strolled in their shaded walks. This Square, like all 

 others, went through phases of being unkept and untidy, 

 but was finally remodelled, into its present neat form, in 

 1845. 



Eastwards, into the heart of London there are the 

 squares which are the remains of the open ground 

 without the City walls. Charterhouse Square, which is 

 now a retired, quiet spot with old houses telling of a 

 former prosperity, has a history reaching back to the 

 fourteenth century. In the days of the Black Death, 

 when people were dying so fast that the Chronicler of 

 London, Stowe, says that " scarce the tenth person of all 

 sorts was left alive," the " churchyards were not sufficient 

 to receive the dead, but men were forced to chuse out 

 certaine fields for burials : whereupon Ralph Stratford, 

 Bishop of London, in the yeere 1348 bought a piece of 

 ground, called No mans land^ which he inclosed with a 

 wall of Bricke, and dedicated for buriall of the dead, 

 builded thereupon a proper Chappell, which is now 

 enlarged, and made a dwelling-house : and this burying 

 plot is become a faire Garden, retaining the old name 

 of Pardon Churchyard." It was very soon after this 

 purchase, that the Carthusian monastery was founded 

 hard by ; but although the land was bought by the 



