The Battle of St Giles's Fields

Name a battle associated with King Henry V. (They don't get much easier than that, do they?)

But one year before Agincourt in 1414 Henry assembled an army at Clerkenwell and marched west to confront the Lollards at roughly the present location of that cutesy, hidden urban green oasis known as Phoenix Gardens, which featured rather heavily in the romcom Last Christmas.

The loser that day was Sir John Oldcastle, a former MP and long time friend of the young King, who had escaped from the Tower of London following a conviction for heresy, and had then decided to organise a full-on rebellion. It is said that Sir John was the chap Shakespeare had in mind when he created the character Falstaff.

Inside the battlefield zone today a Palladian-style parish church from the 1730s holds the name of St Giles-in-the-Fields and stands in the late afternoon shade of Centre Point.

This is where, some six hundred years before its construction, a leper hospital had been established by "Good Queen Maud", Henry I's wife Matilda of Scotland (1080-1118, grand-daughter of the King Duncan offed by Macbeth) at a location believed to be at the midpoint between London and Westminster. Today it is not quite Bloomsbury, not quite Soho, not quite Covent Garden and not quite the West End.

Wherever you find a church of St Giles in England it is typically at a location outside the old medieval walls. He has always been the patron saint of people with disabilities, but lepers were for long a particular specialisation, and Anglo-Norman Christians had apparently learned a trick from the ancient Israelites when it came to positioning facilities for those suffering from that disease, 'outside the camp'.

Anyway, back to the battle of St Giles's Fields of 1414. Oldcastle was leading a force of religious and political radicals, in a way proto-Protestants who presaged similar movements and their societal impact two centuries later.

The Lollards were against the doctrine of transubstantiation, against priest confession, against clerical celibacy and against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while they compared the Pope to the Antichrist and had secretly translated scripture into English.

That they were against capital punishment too didn't help them that much after their defeat to Henry. Sir John had managed to escape after the rout but was captured and returned to the same area, where he was duly hung and barbecued above a wood fire at the same time.

This parish would later be home to Patient Zero in England's Great Plague of the spring of 1665, one of a pair of Frenchmen living at the end of Drury Lane, where Pepys would see a door marked with a black cross for the first time.

But not before it was ground zero for another rebellion, in 1570, this time by Catholics under Anthony Babington against the reigning Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I. He had solicited a letter from Mary Queen of Scots expressing her tacit approval for his plot and this would lead to her execution on 8 February 1587.

By that period the priory was surrounded by narrow streets, containing inns, brothels, butchers, watchmakers, booksellers, belt-makers, justices of the peace and nobility. Maybe not so much different from now, though undoubtedly lacking all those shops selling saxophones and electric guitars in 'Tin Pan Alley'.