The church of St. Leonard’s contained monuments to the memory of three noble families at least: the Westmoreland Nevilles; the Blounts, Lords Mountjoy; and that of Manners, Earls of Rutland. The reason of their tombs and monuments being found in the church must be sought in the history of the manors lying north of Shoreditch. [Illustration: PLAN OF ISLINGTON From a print in the British Museum. By the courtesy of the late Marquis of Salisbury.] On the north side of the City the Moor Fields continued for a long time as waste ground, seldom visited; in 1415, however, Thomas Fawconer, Mayor, broke through the City Wall and built the postern called Moorgate; he constructed causeways over the Moor; cleansed and repaired the dykes or ditches with which the Moor was intersected: so that the place was drained and made into a pleasant walk for the citizens, either on summer evenings, or on their way to Iselden and Hoxton. Sixty years later brickfields were opened in the Moor, and bricks made for the repair of the City Wall. Then citizens began to make and to enclose gardens in the Moor; in 1498 these were all taken away and an archery-field made in their place. In 1512 more dykes were made for the drainage of the Moor, and in 1527 conduits were constructed to carry the waters over the Tower Ditch into the Walbrook. The point is that in the sixteenth century the whole of the ground lying between Moorgate and Bishopsgate was unoccupied by houses. The map already referred to shows the road running north from Moorgate, and the Moor itself crossed by causeways: in the east a broad ditch crossed by bridges falls into the Tower Ditch. The Moor formerly extended beyond Cripplegate and as far as the Fleet River; it was built upon by the Religious Houses; St. Bartholomew’s Priory and Hospital; the Charter House; the Priory of St. John; and the Nunnery of Clerkenwell. Between these houses and the wall were St. Giles’s Church, St. Botolph’s Church, Fore Street, Whitecross Street, and other streets, making a suburb with a population in the sixteenth century of 1800 householders, or 9000 souls. The last bit of the Moor left on the north-west of the City was brickfield. We now come to the western suburb: the earliest settled and the most thickly populated of all. Fleet Street and the streets north of it, however, belonged to the Ward of Farringdon Without. We are now in a position to show other reasons why the extension of the City was so slow and so limited.