It seems but the other day this old suburban church was pleasantly surrounded by green fields and quiet hedgerows; but now the mammoth magnitude of this great city—the modern Babylon—has stretched itself in this direction, as in all others; and St. Pancras’ fields, with their rows of goodly elms, and pleasant meandering footpaths leading to the then village church, exist only as a pleasant memory. Surrounded by houses, the old church seems out of place, and might be passed as little worthy attention. Still are there facts worth noting in its history, and that of the locality in which it stands—and associations which may serve to prompt more than a passing thought. The whole of this neighbourhood is linked by tradition with a deadly fight between the Britons and their invaders, when seventy thousand men were said to have been slain at “Battle-bridge.” Modern fashion has attempted to get rid of the old Saxon name which serves to keep this struggle in remembrance, by christening the locality in courtly guise, King’s Cross—erecting, too, in the centre of the road an architectural hybrid, the use of which could never be discovered, unless built there for omnibuses to run against. All round Battle-bridge traces of entrenchments have been found, running up close to the old church; some of them, called the Brill, occupied the pen of the learned and ingenious Stukely. During the civil wars, also, this spot again became the seat of armed entrenchments, and the Royalists and Parliamentarians occupied the ground which more than a thousand years earlier had been trodden by the armed legions of Rome, and the comparatively defenceless Britons.
