Nine

 When growing up in the 1950s, I came across grown-ups who were well settled into their Fleetville lives (as a child I would have used the word 'old') referred to a non-specific part of the district as Nine Fields, or the Nine Fields.  It has taken decades to home in on the background to this name.

Sear & Carter, who had a garden shop and nursery in Hatfield Road, on the site of today's St Paul's Place, had named it Ninefields Nursery.  So likely it was close by to this group of open space fields.

A class of boys from Hatfield Road Senior Elementary School at work with their teachers on
the land north of Brampton Road in 1917.  Early work to prepare wartime allotments for their
families.  The south side of Brampton Road is in the background.
COURTESY HERTS ADVERTISER

The beginning of the article which accompanies the
photograph above it.
COURTESY HERTS ADVERTISER

Frank Sear (before becoming Sear & Carter) advertised its Hatfield Road shop and adjacent land
as Ninefields Nursery.  The nine fields, however, were north of Brampton Road.

The Herts Advertiser in 1917 ran an article about senior school pupils who had taken on extensive plots of ground "at the Ninefields" for wartime allotments.  The boys (the item was specific here; no girls were mentioned) would take home produce which they grew to their families. In one of the earliest photographs published in the paper the image was spread over the whole width of the page but there was little height to it.  The photographer was probably standing close to where Jennings Road is today, facing south so as to capture large numbers of boys at work, with the south side of Brampton Road beyond.

An uncle, who had grown up in one of those Brampton Road terrace houses, recalled his childhood adventures playing "on the Ninefields at the Woodstock Road end".

With a copy of the 1840 tithe map in front me I annotated that section between Beaumonts and the then city boundary and between Hatfield Road and Sandpit Lane.  Unfortunately I didn't manage to join the split map very effectively. 

The field names might, I thought, provide a clue to the name Nine Fields.  Descriptive as they were, the field names led me no nearer to an answer (except for one field named Nine Acres!)  Perhaps I should look at field names in more detail.  One group focused on locations and general descriptions of shape, such as Further Field or Great Long Field.  A pair of the largest fields in the Sandfield Road/Verulam School area was named Great Moodys and Long Moodys, which suggests an old English reference to fields which are difficult to work, unless someone has a more specific suggestion.

The orange labelled fields belonged to William Cotton of St Peter's Farm. The
unlabelled fields on the left are part of the map below.  Kinder's fields of
Beaumonts Farm and the Grammar School Field, on which Fleet Ville was
built, is not part of this survey.
TITHE MAP COURTESY HALS

A third group defined the fields in terms of their size in acres; there is Four Acres, Seven Acres and so on.  I noted that the group 1 and group 2 fields in 1840 were both owned by William Cotton of St Peter's Farm, whose farmhouse still exists as the Conservative Club, near The Crown.  Group 3 fields all belonged to Earl Spencer.  There were twenty fields in total.  Mr Cotton's apportionment was eleven fields, including the smallest, the almost circular Dell Field, a former chalk pit.  However, Spencer's total was 9 fields – so, to spell it out, Nine Fields.

The green labelled fields belonged to Earl Spencer; the orange labelled
fields belonged to William Cotton of St Peter's Farm and are additional
to his fields on the top map.  The two unlabelled fields lower right appear
on the top map and are labelled on that version.
TITHE MAP COURTESY HALS

The Nine Fields were a contiguous group, all north of Brampton Road, six of them with a boundary to Sandpit Lane and the remainder completely road-locked but edged by the lengthy footpath between Hatfield Road/Beaumont Avenue and St Peter's Church, much of which was adopted by Brampton Road and York Road.

So, although the Nine Fields must have been a specific group which did not include fields in the vicinity of Woodstock Road, it seems that the name became more generalised to refer to all of the fields between Brampton Road, Woodstock Road, Sandpit Lane and Clarence Road; quite possibly a slightly larger area before early 20th century developments.

References to Nine Fields in published works are virtually absent – but then, very little about the eastern districts of St Albans has been published anyway.  If, however, readers of this blog are in possession of more definitive information, please to share it with us.