Finsbury Square

You are standing in a space that was once a marshy, uneven fen outside the walls of the medieval city. Long before it became a square, this area was known as Finsbury Fields, where the ground was cleared in the early sixteenth century to serve as a vital archery range for Londoners. Statutes of the time actually required all men to practice here, and you can still find a single remaining stone marker, called a mark, on display at the nearby Armory House that once served as a target for those early archers.