ever an old competition for mastery), but at last the weavers rallied and beat them.” Such scenes were very frequent, and Moorfields for generations was the theatre of such contests. During the time of the Great Fire, numbers of homeless people camped out there, passing days of discomfort and anxiety about their few remaining household goods. Pepys in his casual way alludes to them: “5th September, ... Into Moorefields (our feet ready to burn, walking through the town among hot coles), and find that full of people, and poor wretches carrying their goods there, and everybody keeping his goods together by themselves (and a great blessing it is to them that it is fair weather for them to keep abroad night and day); drunk there and paid twopence for a plain penny loaf.” The “trained bands” used Moorfields as their exercise ground, and no doubt the prototype of John Gilpin disported himself there. As the fields were drained after 1527 they became more and more the favourite resort of citizens of all ranks. Laid out more as a public garden in 1606, they continued the chief open space of the city until a few generations ago. The garden of the Drapers’ Company was another of the lungs of the City, and the disappearance of the great part of it, also within recent years, is much to be regretted. This land was purchased by the Company from Henry VIII. after the garden had been made by Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, and forfeited on his attainder. His method of increasing his garden was simple enough. He appears to have taken what he wanted from the citizens adjoining, and his all-powerful position at the time left them without redress. Stowe describes the way this land was filched away. “This house being finished, and having some reasonable plot of ground left for a garden, hee caused the pales of the gardens adjoining to the north part thereof, on a sudden to be taken doune, 22 foot to be measured forth right into the north of every man’s ground, a line then to be drawn, a trench to be cast, a foundation laid, and an high bricke wall to be builded. My Father had a garden there, and there was a house standing close to his south pale; this house they loosed from the ground, and bare upon Rowlers into my Father’s garden 22 foot ere my Father heard thereof.... No man durst goe to argue the matter, but each man lost his Land.”