Historian Dr Pauline Ashbridge thought she was carrying out just another routine search of the enclosure and tithe records (payments to the church) for a small booklet she was planning on Friern Park, the road in North Finchley that she lives on – but what she discovered there was so extraordinary that her intended 12-page pamphlet ended up becoming a 170-page history book on the whole of Friern Barnet – The Fields of Friern: A study of a north London Past.

“It started out as a tiny booklet on some of the old houses on Friern Park – they’re all so different and it got me asking how long the really old ones had been there,“ says the former Southgate College lecturer.

“In the tithe records, from when tithes were changed into rents, I found this extraordinary thing – the 1844 map showing the Friern Barnet parish divided into two separate areas. One was called the former Cistercian lands, which comprised the central half of the parish, and the bits to the north and south were called the Residue.

“Nobody had ever suggested before that there might have been Cistercian monks in Friern Barnet, but here was this report saying this half of the parish had belonged to them at the time of the 16th Century Reformation.“

The Cistercian Order had begun in France in the 11th Century and the monks chose ‘plain religious practices and austere daily living’, with a focus on poverty, vegetarianism/veganism, self-sufficiency and hard manual labour.

“Cistercian monks were most commonly found in Wales and the Yorkshire moors,“ says Pauline, originally from South Africa.

“They might have owned little monasteries in other parts of the country, but not anywhere in Middlesex. I had to find out if this was possible. I’m not a medieval historian but I had to get into all that – looking at all the early writings and original documents. And I came to the conclusion that it was possible that the Cistercians were occupying or leasing the manorial lands from the Knights Hospitallers, a ‘military-like’ monastic order who owned much of the land up to the time of the Reformation. It was astonishing. In historical terms, this is so interesting.“

  • The Fields of Friern is available from Waterstones, High Road, North Finchley or from Amazon