Place Name
Sir Richard Cloudesley (1465 – 1518) was a Tudor landowner who was buried at St Mary’s, Islington. He owned a field on this site and left the income from it to charity which continues to this day. In 1509, shortly after the accession of Henry Vlll, he described himself as a “husbandman, yeoman or gentleman” living in Islington. A few years earlier, in 1494, while executing his duties as constable, he killed William Lloyd of Islington, gentleman, claiming self-defence, he was briefly imprisoned at Marshalsea in Southwark, until he was exonerated by John Elryngton, one of the coroners for Middlesex, and its acceptance by Chief Justice Hussey. On October 24, 1494, Henry VII granted him a pardon. A decade later Cloudesley was one of a number of men accused by Richard Walker, the son and heir of a London grocer, of depriving him of his inheritance. Walker, who was under age, had parted with land in Islington and elsewhere, and then regretted it. Sometime, in the following 12 years, Cloudesley, together with two other men, was accused of preventing William Gibson from entering into 31 acres of wood, meadow and pasture in Islington, in what looks like a collusive action to establish Gibson’s title to the property. In the autumn of 1513, he was appointed escheator for Middlesex, with responsibility for collecting dues owed to the King. On January 7, 1518 he acquired from Sir William Sandys a ‘mese’ (house) and 30 acres of meadow in Holloway which he had previously held by copyhold from Sandys as lord of the manor of Barnsbury. Shortly afterwards he married a woman called Alice, and wrote his will leaving her the land. Within two months he was dead. He had been well prepared to meet his maker, having set aside various sums for masses to be said for his soul. He also set aside 14 acres called Stoney Fields in Islington, the revenue from which was to be administered by six men chosen annually to pay for the masses, obits and charitable distributions in perpetuity (these included an allowance of straw for the prisoners of Newgate, King’s Bench, Marshalsea, and Bedlam, gowns valued at 6s 8d each for the poor). This charity continues to this day – giving out some £1m a year. In 1825 nearby Cloudesley Square was built by carpenter John Emmett, who leased land from the Cloudesley Estate and built along the Liverpool Road from 1824 to 1826. Cloudesley had asked to be buried in the churchyard at Islington near the grave of his parents. Although the church was bombed in the Second World War his was one of the few tombs to survive.
