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 
18 4 S- 
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 man s 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 
