Notes and Queries, No. 14, February 2, 1850 - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt: ... fields behind Montague House were, from about the year 1680, until towards the end of the last century, the scenes of robbery, murder, and every species of depravity and wickedness of which the heart can think. They appear to have been originally called the Long Fields, and afterwards (about Strype's time) the Southampton Fields. These fields remained waste and useless, with the exception of some nursery grounds near the New Road to the north, and a piece of ground enclosed for the Toxophilite Society, towards the northwest, near the back of Gower Street. The remainder was the resort of depraved wretches, whose amusements consisted chiefly in fighting pitched battles, and other disorderly sport, especially on the Sabbath day. Such was their state in 1800. Tradition had given to the superstitious at that period a legendary story of the period of the Duke of Monmouth's Rebellion, of two brothers who fought in this field so ferociously as to destroy each other; since which, their footsteps, formed from the vengeful struggle, were said to remain, with the indentations produced by their advancing and receding; nor could any grass or vegetable ever be produced where these forty footsteps were thus displayed. This extraordinary arena was said to be at the extreme termination of the northeast end of Upper Montague Street; and, profiting by the fiction, Miss Porter and her sister produced an ingenious romance thereon, entitled, Coming Out, or the Forty Footsteps. The Messrs. Mayhew also, some twenty years back, brought out, at the Tottenham Street Theatre, an excellent melodrama piece, founded upon the same story, entitled The Field of Forty Footsteps. In 1792, an ingenious and enterprising architect, James Burton, began to erect a number of houses on the Foundling Hospital estate, partly in St. Giles's and Bloomsbury parishes, and partly in that of St. Pancras. Baltimore House, built, towards the northeast of Bedford House, by Lord Baltimore, in 1763, ...