THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT 1 ROFESSOR A. M. EVERITT, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S. I.INTRODUCTORY The landscape history of Kent is a vast subject. After working on it intermittently for the past eight or nine years, I am still baffled by many of its complexities. Nevertheless, it is a subject of the deepest interest not only for its own sake but for the light it sheds on the making of the landscape in other parts of England, particularly during the early phases of English society. In certain respects, we know more about the early settlement history of Kent than of most other counties; and although at many points that history appears puzzling or eccentric, its peculiarities raise fundamental questions about other parts of the country. I am gradually coming to feel, moreover, that although some of these peculiarities are indeed unique to the county, others were at one time not so eccentric as they now seem but were more widely typical of this country as a whole than is commonly realized. In the landscape of Kent, in short, there are substantial indications of an earlier world that elsewhere has often survived only in shadow. Through an examination of these indications, the shadows themselves seem to acquire a new meaning and a new reality. What I want to concentrate on in this paper is not so much the evolution of early Kentish society, as the evolution of the landscape itself. What is the evidence for the settlement history of the county that we can actually see in the countryside around us today? What are the 1 This article is based on a paper read to the Kent Archaeological Society at Maidstone in May 1975. Since then it has been substantially revised and rewritten. The section with which the original paper concluded, dealing with river settlements and the •wold' area of east Kent, has been omitted for reasons of space; it is hoped to publish it in an expanded form elsewhere. The research on which the article is based has been undertaken chiefly in connexion with my forthcoming volume on The Making of the enlish Landscape. As is obvious, my debt to other scholars is great indeed. They cannot II be mentioned here, but a special debt is due to J. K. Wallenberg's two pioneering volumes Kentlsh Place-Names (1931) and The Place-Names of Kent (1934). Though they now obviously need revision in the light of more recent research in place-name studies, this article could not have been written without them. An equal debt is due, as always, to Edward Hasted's History and Toporaphical Survey of the County of Kent (2nd edn, 1797-1801). Of more modern studies Mr Frank Jessup's History of Kent with Maps and Pictures (1958) packs more facts, figures, and perceptive observations into its 180 eminently readable pages than any other I know. 1 A. M. EVERITT dominant characteristics of the landscape of Kent as they appear to me, after having lived els'ewhere in England for the past fifteen years? When one thinks of its evolution over the past 1,500 or 2,000 years, what are its really most enduring features? The answer to these questions must begin by making a few negative points and disposing of some of those characteristics which are often supposed to be all-pervasive in the county but which, on the long view, are either more recent in their origin or more limited in their effects than is generally imagined. II. RE-APPRAISALS The first of these misconceptions, as I see them, is the view that Kentish history has been chiefly shaped by the proximity of London. Now no one would deny that over the past century or so the metropolitan impact has been very great; but taking a longer view what are the facts that we need to remember? First, that London was a Mercian not a Kentish town and had virtually no influence on the early settlement history of the county. Secondly, that all its historic transpontine suburbs were in Surrey and that its continuously built-up area did not extend as far as Deptford, the first parish in Kent, until after 1800. Thirdly, that although it has always been England's largest city, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it was no larger than modern Maidstone and barely one-third the size of the Medway towns. Fourthly, in the development of Kentish society the pull of London has always been counterbalanced by the size of the county and its peninsular position, which necessarily created and for many centuries perpetuated an exceptionally inbred and introverted community. Nowadays, Kent has lost part of its historic area to Greater London, including a substantial stretch of genuine countryside around Downe; but originally the county covered 1,040,000 acres and was substantially exceeded in area only by Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Devon, Norfolk, Northumberland, and Lancashire.2 Since its extremity, moreover, lies seventy-five miles or so from London, much of the county until relatively recently lay beyond the immediate orbit of the metropolis. If one draws a circle of forty miles around the capital, the area so described comprises the whole of Middlesex, Surrey, and Hertfordshire, more than half of Essex and Buckinghamshire, and a good half of Bedfordshire, whereas more than half of Kent lies beyond it. Forty miles is no great distance in modern terms: but until the mid-eighteenth century it represented a day's journey by stage-coach along the only good road in the county, Watling Street, and two days' journey by the cumbrous stage-waggons by which most people travelled. Whenever 2 Three other counties, Essex, Hampshire (including the Isle of Wight), and Somerset, were almost identical in size with Kent. Estimates of their historic area vary; Hampshire and Somerset were almost certainly slightly larger than Kent. 2 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT George II visited bis German dominions, he was driven to spend the first night of his travels at Sittingbourne. 3 It was not until well into the nineteenth century, in fact, that the transformation of west Kent under the impact of metropolitan wealth, itself a story of great interest and by no means so simple as it may appear, really began in earnesL Until then the wealth of Kent and the inspiration behind its settlement and evolution lay predominantly in the east and centre of the shire. Many little signs indicate this historic predominance. of the east. Nearly all the most ancient settlements of the county, for example, apart from those in the Darent valley, are to be found in east and central Kent. All its fifteen ancient incorporated boroughs, except Gravesend, lie east of the Medway. The capital of the ancient Kingdom of Kent, Canterbury, is situated nearly sixty miles from the western edge of the shire and from London. And until the time of the Hearth Tax the fiscal records of the Kingdom clearly indicate the relative poverty of west Kent outside the three or four parishes bordering London, such as Greenwich and Woolwich.4 The second misconception which needs to be disposed of is the legendary wealth of the county compared with other parts of England. Until the sixteenth or seventeenth century that legend is in fact largely mythical. Medieval Kent indeed contained some very wealthy stretches of countryside, particularly in the north-eastern corner of the county; but it also included extensive poor districts and, as a whole, it was not among the richest counties of England, in the thirteenth century ranking only eleventh or twelfth in terms of taxable capacity per square mile.5 Everyone acquainted with Kentish history knows the old jingle: A knight of Cales, A gentleman of Wales, A laird of the North Countree, A yeoman of Kent With his yearly rent Will buy them out all three. But when comparative evidence for the wealth of the gentry first 3 Hasted, op. cit., vi, 152. 4 See, for example, Dr. R. E. Glasscock's map of the distribution of lay wealth in Kent in 1334, in Arch. Cant., lxxx (1965), 64. 5 Its assessment for the Fifteenth in 1225 works out at 16s. per square mile. This figure was exceeded by those for Norfolk. Suffolk, Lines., Rutland, Northants., Beds., Bucks., Middx., Berks., Oxon., and Glos. The comparable figure for 1334 was exceeded by those for Norfolk, Carobs., Hunts., Northants., Beds., Oxon., Berks., Rutland, Middx., and Glos. - See H. C. Darby, ed., A New Historical Geography of England, 1973, p. 141 and maps on pp. 78 and 79. This is not the place for a discussion of the validity of these assessments, a problem which is fraught with difficulties. In so far as the Cinque Ports were excluded the figures for Kent and Sussex are understated; in so far as these counties were nearer the centre of government, one suspects that they may have been overassessed in relation to remoter counties of which the government was less well-informed. 3 A. M. EVERITT becomes reasonably reliable and abundant, in the mid-seventeenth century, there is little difference between the average wealth of Kentish armigerous families (let alone the yeomanry) and those of the Welsh Marches, the east Midlands, Yorkshire, or East Anglia; though, of course, they were better off than most of the gentry of the Cambrian mountains or the remoter parts of the Pennines. 6 These facts should not surprise us. On the whole, after all, the manor houses of Kent, though exceptionally numerous, are not exceptionally large or splendid. Its medieval parish churches, though of much interest ecclesiologically, are not generally of the same architectural quality as those of Somerset, East Anglia, Northamptonshire, or the Cotswolds. We have nothing to compare with the glories of Melton Mowbray or Long Melford, let alone ·st. Peter Mancroft or St. Mary Redcliffe. At the end of the medieval period, it is true, there are grounds for thinking that the wealth of Kent expanded rapidly, and it is this fact that lies behind the widespread rebuilding of church towers and farmhouses at this time. In the subsidies of the 1520s a larger area of the county was taxed at 40s. and more per square mile than of any other shire. In the Monthly Assessments of the Civil War period Kent was one of the five most heavily burdened counties, along with Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Devon. But it is significant that in the 1650s the assessment of these five counties was substantially reduced, from 38 per cen of the total to 25 per cent; and it is not in fact until the time of the Hearth Tax, in the 1660s, that we can be quite positive that Kent was amongst the five or six richest counties of England. Even then, it was not as wealthy in relation to its size as Surrey and nowhere nearly as wealthy as extrametropolitan Middlesex. 7 The truth is that until recent generations there have always been dramatic contrasts in Kent between its rich and its poor districts, and it was only the former, generally speaking, that travellers commented on in passing through the county. If the main routes through Kent had traversed the Downland instead of the coastal plain north of the Downs, they would have told a very different story. The architectural poverty of the chalk uplands and the topographical descriptions of Edward Hasted, wh knew every parish in the county 6 For Kent see, Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-60, 1966, 41, 329. For other counties Mrs. M. F. Keeler, in The Long Parliament 1640-1641, 1954, gives estimated incomes for many members of parliament. The 'particulars of estates' and other documents in the records of the Committee for Compounding in the Public Record Office shed much light on the family incomes of the gentry; these are briefly summarized in the Calendar of the Committee/or Compounding. Figures for Yorkshire worked out by Dr. J. T. Cliffe shew that the broad pattern of wealth in that county was similar to that in Kent; the average income of knights and sq\J,ires appears to have been actually rather higher in Yorkshire than in Kent.- Cf. J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War, 1969; Alan Everitt, Change in the Provinces: the Seventeenth Century, 19. 7 Darby, op. cit., 196; Everitt, Change in the Provinces, 16-17, 54. 4 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT intimately at the end of the eighteenth century, bear witness to a striking difference of economic fortunes between the Downs on one hand and the rich coastal plain of north-east Kent on the other.8 Thirdly, it is not the natural fertility of soil and the consequent development of hop-growing and fruit-farming that most strike me in Kent. This popular image of the county is once again to some extent a misleading one.9 Though in Romney Marsh and in some of the fruit and hop-growing areas - for example around Maidstone and Sittingbourne - we have some of the most fertile lands in England, these tracts of countryside are of limited extent and the county as a whole is not generally fertile like such east Midland counties as Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. Its orchards, though more extensive than those of any other county, comprise only about eight per cent of its area. Its hopgardens have now contracted to little more than 1 per cent, though a century ago they were four times as extensive.10 Of course, it goes without saying that orchards and hop-grounds form a prominent element in the landscape history of Kent, and an absolutely vital one in its economy. But there are two points in this connexion that need to be remembered. First, they are relatively modern developments, created entirely within the last four centuries and largely within the last two. The oasthouse as we know it today, that charming though hackneyed symbol of the county, is a purely nineteenth-century structure. Secondly, the remaining eight- or nine-tenths of the shire, where neither orchards nor hop-fields have ever been established, have also exerted a decisive influence in Kentish history. For the fact is that these areas comprise a great deal of comparatively unrewarding or intractable land, and that intractability has always been one of the most important factors in the settlement history of the county. Until the invention of satisfactory claypipe drainage in the mid-nineteenth century, moreover, the difficulties of cultivation in Kent were more widespread and decisive in their effect than they are today, particularly on the heavy claylands of the Weald.11 Even at the end of the nineteenth century, during the great farming depression, the agricultural writer Charles Whitehead remarked that 'without hops, fruit, and vegetables Kent would have felt the depression 8 See, for example, Darby, op. cit., 139, where Dr. Glasscock's map of assessed wealth in 1334 suggests that the coastal plain of north-east Kent was several times as wealthy as the Weald, and more than six times as wealthy as the south-west corner of the county. Such contrasts were not peculiar to Kent. but they were more marked there than in many counties, such as Essex, Dorset. or Northamptonshire. 9 See, G. H. Garrad's invaluable study, A Survey of the Agriculture of Kem, 1954, 1-2, and Chapter Il: 'one must not think of the whole county as a fertile garden. There is a larger proportion of good and medium-quality land in Kent than in the other Home Counties, but there is also a great deal of poor land ... there are also large stretches of poor, dry chalk downland and wide belts of wet, stubborn clay' (ibid., 1, 2). 10 Garrad, op. cit., 209, 95. 11 Cf. ibid., 34-8, for the problems of farming on the Wealden clay. 5 A. M. EVERITT in agriculture quite as much as any county in England, as there is so much poor land within its borders, and ... many of its agriculturalists who have neither hop nor fruit land have either succumbed or are in a sorry plight.'12 It was during that depression, and often before the institution of death duties, that many of the old landed families of the shire were driven to sell up their ancestral estates. Their representatives are now often to be found only in North America or Australasia. Ill. CHARACTERISTICS So much for negative points: what positive characteristics come to light in comparing Kent with other parts of England? Amongst many that might be mentioned, perhaps five are particularly worth pointing out. The first is undoubtedly the variety of landscape to be found in the county and its division into sharply-contrasted regions or pays. 'Kent, in fact, is a county of contrasts,' wrote G. H. Garrad in the 1950s. 'Owing basically to the geological conditions, the nature of the soil probably varies more frequently and more abruptly than in any other county of similar size.'13 Again, at the beginning of the nineteenth century William Marshall wrote: 'Kent, more than any other county, I think, of equal extent, naturally separates into well-defined districts.'14 His comment may seem a slight exaggeration, but Marshall was not a local man. He had wide knowledge of other parts of England, and certainly the agrarian districts of Kent are more sharply distinguished than those of Midland counties, like Leicestershire, or eastern counties, like Essex and Suffolk. Speaking very broadly they may be said to form five predominant types of country or pays: the cornland, the downland, the chartland, the woodland, and the marshland. Underlying these types of countryside in Kent is the exceptionally varied geology of the county, as is well illustrated by G. H. Garrad's map.15 Although the relationship between geology and landscape is never one of simple determinism, it is impossible to get away from the profound influence of geology in Kent in any consideration of its settlement, topography, agrarian history, or vernacular architecture. From north to south the county is based on a series of nine successive geological formations, each overlying the next and each giving rise to a distinct belt of countryside. These formations are the London Clay, the Thanet Beds, the Chalk, the Upper Greensand, the Gault Clay, the 12 'A sketch of the Ariculture of Kent', Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of Enqland, 3rd Ser., x, (1899), 457. Whitehead was a fruit-farmer at Barming, near Maidstone. The italics are mine. 13 Garrad, op. cit., 1-2. 14 William Marshall, The Review and Abstract of the County Reports to the Board of Agriculture, v (Southern and Peninsular Departments), (1818), 413. u Garrad, op. clt., 19. 6 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT Lower Greensand, the Wealden Clay, the Wealden Sandstone, and the alluvial deposits of Romney Marsh. Within these formations there are also important sub-divisions, and the drift geology of the county gives rise to a bewildering variety of local soil types, often within a single parish. The first belt of countryside to which these formations give rise is the low-lying but gently undulating district along the northern borders of the county between the Downland and the coast. The proximity of this stretch of country to the sea, based as it is chiefly on the fertile and easily-worked Oldhaven Beds, Thanet Sands, and Brickearths was a circumstance of the first importance in the early settlement history of the county. Until recent generations it has probably always been the wealthiest and most thickly-populated part of Kent, as well as its chief corn-growing district and the cradle of its orchards and hop-gardens. In the absence of a generally accepted modern term, I venture to denominate this unromantic yet important stretch of countryside the foothills. Its height above sea-level is nowhere considerable, but it is sufficiently above the damp, unhealthy marshland and close enough to the sea to have attracted early settlement. South of the foothills lies the next region, the chalk Downland, stretching seventy miles east and west in a continuous range of hills from the Surrey border to the South Foreland, severed only by the river valleys of the Darent, Medway, and Stour. To the early settlers of the county this was a much less fertile and attractive region than the foothills, but it is one with a distinctive character of its own in the history of Kent, and it remains perhaps the most beautiful and unfrequented part of the county, now happily protected as a designated area. South of this region again, at the foot of the Downland escarpment, the Upper Greensand and Gault form a narrow yet comparatively fertile and well-watered tract of countryside which, like the foothills, exerted a powerful influence in the early settlement history of Kent. Beyond the Gault Clay rises the Lower Greensand, a hill-country still largely wooded, and often called the Stone Hills or Quarry Hills by old writers because of its many stone buildings and countless petts or quarries of the Kentish rag. The stony and infertile nature of much of the Greensand, except in the Maidstone area, accounts for its predominantly wooded appearance and gives rise to its other name, the Chart/and. Chart is a word, which is cognate with the Norwegian kart, meaning 'rough, rocky, sterile soil', and it is an element frequently found in the place-names of this region, as in Great Chart, Seal Chart, and Chart Sutton. South of this escarpment, reaching to the Sussex border, stretches the vast expanse of the Weald, which is itself divided into the heavy-soiled Low Weald, or Vale of Kent, and the generally light-soiled High Weald based on the sandstones. Until the nineteenth century this was a great 7 REGIONS OF KENT 00 0 Fig_ L !::H:i Nod.,-ti-. S tKoa.vnr-t"L Me-,cw.,,alSh o.!. Ble0-1'\. For-e.sf- !;!.-JJ Up\nd. er Foe> t-h • Us !::;::::;:/ Dovnla.i\d <:jo.ult- Clo.j III]] Cor-wLotwa-Ir 5 Qr.12R.vo.r-"!r>f'll l-ohdl ls t-:-:-j l.c,,i 'vl.e.o.lci or ¼\4. of Ko.n t- i ':-:-:l H,jh \,JB-lcl E'2.J'Romu!!Me.n;1, c,.nd. "R,oil-> .. r LQ.'14.ls THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT pastoral region which still retained much of its remote and inhospitable character in the eyes of contemporary travellers. Finally, there is the Marshland, another type of pastoral country comprising not only the famous Romney area, but extensive tracts along the north coast of Kent, and those wide alluvial Levels of the Stour, still almost uninhabited, which lie between the mainland and the Isle of Thanet. It is because of this great variety of landscape that until recent generations Kent has always exhibited, in Nellie Neilson's pregnant words, 'a remarkable combination of advanced civilization on the one hand, which prevailed along Roman roads and in those parts that were accessible to continental influence and had formed the early channel of communication with the continent, and on the other of the very primitive conditions natural to fen and deep wood'. 16 The second characteristic of Kent that strikes me is the very marked dispersal of its settlement pattern. It is doubtful in fact if there are any true 'villages' in the county in the Midland sense of the word, that is to say nucleated places, historically based solely on farming and organized on a communal basis. Despite the picture post-cards and the glossy calendars, most of the so-called villages of the county, such as Goudhurst, Chilham, and Smarden, are in fact little decayed market towns rather than agricultural communities pure and simple. Such settlements existed, it is true, before they became market towns; but as yet there is little or nothing to prove that they were nucleated in form before they became trading centres, for the most part in the early medieval period though in some cases before the Conquest. Of the remaining 'villages', some are purely modem developments; the rest are either small medieval industrial communities, like Biddenden and Staplehurst, or else villages created through infilling between older scattered houses, chiefly in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, as at Boughton Street, near Faversham} 6" Even if it is eventually proved that some Kentish villages were genuinely nucleated in form from the outset, apart from their subsequent status as markets, it will still be true to say that there are probably no parishes in the county where in historic times settlement has ever been concentrated in a single community. In this respect the settlement pattern of Kent is everywhere distinctly marked off frqm that of the Midland counties. In all parts of the shire - foothills, Marsh, Downs, Chartland, or Weald - there are numerous scattered outlying farms, 16 Nellie Neilson, ed., The Cartu/ary and Terrier of the Priory of Bflsington, Kent, (1928), 2. 16• Hasted writes of Boughton Street: 'This street is of late years become the principal village; the houses in it are most of them modern and neatly built ... ': op. cit., vii, 3-4. The original settlement was more than a mile away, near the church. The Street is clearly medieval in origin, however, and is in fact referred to by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. 9 A. M. EVERITT sometimes as many as fifty or sixty in a single parish, most of them on sites that have been occupied for six or seven centuries, and not a few for more than a thousand years. In the Midlands, generally, there is no real parallel to this situation. Although it is certainly possible to find parts of central England where settlement is dispersed, and indeed such areas are more numerous than is commonly supposed, they are usually associated with old forest or woodland districts whose colonization was not part of the original English settlement and·often did not take place until after the Norman Conquest. In these respects there are close resemblances between areas like the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire and the Weald of Andred in Kent.and Sussex: in both cases clearance of woodland and colonization of the waste took place relatively late and was perhaps usually the work of individual freemen, carving out their own isolated farms, rather than of an organized community. From the dispersed forms of settlement characteristic of these areas we can clearly deduce nothing, in either region, about the early phases of colonization, in the J utish or Anglo-Saxon period. But in Kent the significant fact to note is that, as far as we can see, scattered settlement has always been characteristic of every part of the county, of the Downs and of the foothills quite as much as of the Weald itself. The reasons behind this dispersal of settlement on the Downs and the foothills are complex and obscure. They may well arise, as some scholars have argued, from an underlying Celtic stratum in the settlement history of the county. There are weighty arguments both for and against this view; but in the limits of this paper, I must not be drawn into a discussion of them, however fascinating they may be. For the purpose in hand i t is sufficient to say that the dispersal of settlement on the Upland and perhaps on the Downs arises from different causes from those that operated in the Weald and must certainly go back to a more ancient stratum in the history of the county. It implies, amongst other things, that those isolated parish churches which are so marked a feature of the Dowland landscape of Kent, such as Crundale and Molash, cannot in themselves be taken to indicate deserted medieval village sites, as they normally would be in the Midlands and sometimes have been in Kent.17 17 Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst, eds., Deserted Medieval Villages, (1971), 191-2, print in their 'County Gazetteers of Deserted Medieval Villages' a lengthy list of 69 places for Kent. So far as the present writer is aware there is, in most cases, nothing to prove that there ever was a village at the sites in question, though there may in some cases have been a manor house and perhaps one or two farmhouses and/or cottages. No sources are given, and in the cases known to me there is little or nothing In the way of earthworks, such as are common in the Midlands and elsewhere at sites of this kind, to indicate a former village. Such evidence as the decline in taxable capacity in the later medieval period, of course, generally relates to .parishes, 'boroughs (sc., Kentish for 'townships'), or the like, and does not prove the existence of nucleated settlement, though it is of course often important evidence for a decline in population. Many places listed have isolated churches, or are fotmer isolated church sites, and it may be that this fact 10 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT Although there is a very large number of lost churches and chapels in the county - I have myself traced more than eighty of them - only a tiny handful of these certainly indicate the sites of deserted villages. The most well known, that of Mereworth, did not disappear from the landscape till the eighteenth century, when the present Castle was rebuilt by Colen Campbell and a new church was built outside the park. Mereworth, however, is not a typical example: the vast majority of the lost churches and chapels of Kent certainly fell into ruin during the latter half of the medieval period or in some cases the sixteenth century. The third feature that particularly strikes me in Kent is the antiquity of the landscape compared with that of the Midlands. By that expression I do not mean that the whole county was settled · before the English colonization of the Midlands began. That would certainly not be true. In fact, whereas practically every village in counties like Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire, or even in Devon,. had been on the map for some considerable time when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, in Kent, as in Sussex, there were still extensive regions that remained largely uncolonized till after the Conquest, including most of the Weald and much of the Chartland and Marshland. 18 By the antiquity of the landscape I mean two things. First, in a good deal of the county, particularly on the foothills to the north and east of the Downs, the evidences of Roman and Romano-British civilization continually shew through the surface in a way that is comparatively rare in counties like Leicestershire, at any rate in the present state of has prompted their inclusion in the list. But in Kent, as is argued in this article, it is essential to keep the two concepts distinct: a deserted church site or an isolated church certainly does not prove the eX1stence of a deserted village, though of course it is 9uite possible that further research or excavation may bring genuine deserted villages to light. Of the two articles for Kent describing excavations, listed on p. 156, one in fact relates to a single pagan Saxon hut; the other, A. F. Allen's article on 'The Lost Village of Merston', in Arch. Cant., lxxi (1957), actually relates to a lost church not to a lost village. In the important current work of exploration of deserted medieval villages, a more rigorous definition of terms is badly needed. 18 For Devon, the case is argued by W. G. Hoskins in 'The Making of the Agrarian Landscape' in Devonshire Studies, ed. W. G. Hoskins and H.P. R. Finberg, 1952. So far as the sparsity of settlement in the Weald is concerned the case is difficult to put briefly. The fact that very few Wealden places are mentioned in Domesday Book is not in itself conclusive, since a considerable number of Wealden churches are recorded in the Textus Rojfensis of c. 1100, which are not mentioned in Domesday. But the following facts need to be borne in mind: (1) Where Domesday does mention Wealden places, their recorded population is usually very small, so that it looks as though they must be of relatively recent origin; (2) Very few Wealden places are clearly recorded as permanent settlements in Anglo-Saxon charters, though they may be recorded as denns, that is summer pastures; (3) When early taxation records enable us to estimate the population of Wealden parishes, it is clear that they are generally amongst the most thinly populated parishes in the county; (4) There is very little early Norman architecture in the Wealden churches; (5) Unless they relate to undoubtedly very early settlements, large parishes (such as we find in the Weald) are for obvious reasons almost everywhere associated with late-settled and thinly-populated areas, as for example the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. 11 A. M. EVERITT archaeological knowledge. Secondly, quite apart from these vestiges of the Roman world, we have in Kent a landscape which, outside the urban and suburban areas, is still basically a medieval one, if indeed it is not in many of its aspects very much older. In other words, it is a landscape which, outside the built-up areas, has by and large been far less subject to dramatic changes over the past two or three centuries than that of most Midland Counties. Since George II's reign, the appearance of counties like Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire has been largely transformed by parliamentary enclosure in a way that could not have occurred in Kent, where so much of the countryside was enclosed from the time of its colonization. Of course, there have been changes in Kent, and changes of great importance; but, on the whole, in the countryside at any rate, these have taken place within the old framework without revolutionizing or destroying it. As a consequence, there are probably about ten thousand farms and hamlets in Kent whose sites have been continuously occupied for the best part of 800 years, and in many cases for a very much longer period. There is little parallel to this situation in counties like Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire, where most outlying farm-sites are no older than the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The extraordinary abundance of medieval and sub-medieval buildings in Kent, which has so often been taken as a sign of wealth, should thus be seen as evidence rather of exceptional continuity of settlement than of exceptional prosperity in agriculture. Altogether there are at least 5,000 buildings that come within this category, and the true figure may well be nearer 8,000. 19 19 These remarks are based on an analysis of the provisional lists of Scheduled Buildings compiled by the former Ministry of Town and Country Planning. By the term 'medieval and sub-medieval', I refer to the period during which broadly 'traditional' methods of timber-framing prevailed in Kent. So far as vernacular architecture is concerned this period may be taken, very roughly, to have continued till the midseventeenth century. Timber-framing of a kind, dating from the late-seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, is of course also very common in Kent1 but forms of construction are as a rule clearly different. The Ministry listed about 4,500 amber-framed buildings of the former kind, but its inspectors generally examined them from the external point of view only. A very large proportion of such buildings in the county is in fact concealed beneath later cladding of tiles, brickwork, weather-boarding, etc. Although many of these were recognized by the inspectors, even a superficial inspection by the present writer has discovered a large number that escaped notice. A thorough examination of all the building structures of any one parish would certainly bring many more to light behind the faades and rebuildings. The distribution pattern of these medieval and sub-medieval buildins in Kent is one of great interest and shews remarkable regional variations. This 1s not the place for a discussion of it, but it may be remarked that the heaviest concentrations are found in the Weald, the foothills between Boughton-under-Blean and Rainham, and parts of the Chartland. There are very few, it is worth noting, between London and the Darent Valley, a fact which cannot wholly be explained by their destruction in the London suburbs, and which is no doubt largely due to the relative poverty of much of this area during the period in question, though it may also, of course, have been partly determined by the local absence of suitable timber. The Downs, generally, have many fewer timber-framed buildings than the Weald and the foothills, although considerable numbers do exist in the central stretch of Downland between the Stour Valley and the Medway. 12 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT Visually speaking that is perhaps the most remarkable indication we have in Kent of the continuity of local settlement. Such continuity as this is, of course, not peculiar to the county, but there is perhaps no part of England where it is more obviously written in the contemporary landscape, and until recently it gave to Kentish society a certain density of texture that hindered and limited metropolitan penetration more effectively than in many counties further from London. In the seventeenth century, for example, the wealth of the new gentry of the time was far more apparent in a county like Northamptonshire than it was in Kent, and certainly more influential in changing the local landscape and transforming county society.20 The fourth feature that strikes me in Kent is the importance of woodland in the history of the county. As everyone knows, the word Weald is derived from the Germanic wald and specifically means 'forest'. Perhaps less well-known is the fact that much of the Downland is also densely wooded and that Kent is still one of the most heavily forested counties in England. Its tree-cover is exceeded only by that of Sussex and Hampshire and amounts to about 100,000 acres, or more than all its orchards and eight times as much as all its hop-gardens. 21 Until the draining of the Wealden clays in the nineteenth century the forested area may have been a good deal more extensive, and it was certainly much greater at the time of the Norman Conquest. As in Sussex, whose historical development in many ways echoes that of Kent, the extent and distribution of woodland has always been more or less closely related to poverty or intractability of terrain. There is practically no wood nowadays in the whole north-eastern segment of the county, in Romney Marsh, or in the Isle of Sheppey; there is very little on the fertile foothills north of the Downs or in the extensive Hundred of Hoo between the estuaries of the Medway and the Thames. It is quite likely, moreover, that in most of these districts there never has been much in the way of tree-cover. 22 Apart from the difficulty of growing 20 For Kent, cf. Everitt, Community of Kent, chapter II; for a brief comparison with Northamptonshire, see, Alan Everitt, The Local Community and the Great Rebellion, (1969), ff. 19. 21 Garrad, op. cit., 198. The percentage of land under wood is also greater in Surrey, but the area is smaller than in Kent since the county itself is less than half the size. The figures are as follows: Sussex 14•6 per cent; Surrey 14• l per cent; Hampshire 12·2 per cent; Kent 10· 1 per cent 22 But the foothill area between Blean Forest and Chatham, and across the Medway into Hoo, was clearly at one time heavily forested, forming in fact a continuation of the Blean itself. This is shown by the appearance of the rare Celtic word ceto or ea/to, meaning 'forest' (cf. modem Welsh coed), in at least three and probably four place-names in the district: Chatham itself, Cbattenden in Frindsbury, Chetney in Iwade, and probably the lost Chetham in Ospringe (Hasted, op. cit., vi, 499). Wallenberg (PlaceNames of Kent, 127) was hesitant about accepting this explanation for the first three names (he does not mention Chetham), on the ground that Celtic names are rare in Kent. This argument is obviously a circular one, however, and there is in fact a considerable body of Celtic place-names in the county, certainly more than in a Midland county like 13 A. M. EVERITT forest trees in marshy areas, the land is generally too valuable in these parts of the county to waste in relatively unprofitable timber-production. Consequently, much of the remaining woodland of Kent still lies where it has always lain: on the sandy or stony soils of the Chartland; on the heavier clays and hungry sandstones of the Weald;_ and on the chalk Downs wherever they are mantled with that terrible clay-with-flints, which has been the despair of so many generations of Kentish farmers. It is principally the tree-cover on the clay-with-flints that still distinguishes the chalk country of Kent from the bare whale-backed hills that most people associate with downland scenery. It is less dramatic countryside, in consequence, than that of the Sussex downs or Salisbury Plain; but, for those familiar with its hidden woods and winding combes, it has a haunting beauty of its own, especially under the magical light that inspired Samuel Palmer. The extent of tree-cover in Kent bears witness not only to a comparatively difficult terrain but also to the relatively sparse population and poor economy of much of the county until recent times, particularly when compared with areas such as Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, whose woods had largely vanished by the time of Domesday Book. Of course, the poverty of the Weald and Downland must not be exaggerated: so far as agricu1tural potential was concerned, it was not in the same category of poverty as that of the Pennine moorlands of Cumberland and Northumberland. Yet, it needs to be borne in mind because of its profound and enduring influence on the settlement history of the county. Until well into the Saxon period, in fact, both Kent and Sussex need to be thought of as overwhelmingly regions of forest, and for many centuries later their evolution was still largely shaped by this brooding presence of the wald. At its maximum extent, the forest stretched for nearly a hundred miles east and west, between Petersfield and Deal, and for forty miles north and south, between Watling Street and the South Downs. Its sheer size, the density of its woods, and the difficulty of communication across it, imparted to the region an isolation which more than counterbalanced the fragile civilization along its outer margins. In many ways what the moorlands were to the North, the wald Leicestershire. There seems no real reason to doubt, in fact, that all four names contain the element ceto, as A. H. Smith demonstrates in the case of Chatham (English PlaceName Elements, (1956), i, 92). Both Chatham and Chetham are thus identical in meaning with the well-known example of Cheetham in Lancashire. The fact that all four names are found in this one stretch of country is s1.1rely significant. The forest character they indicate is supported, moreover, by the evidence of a considerable number of later woodland names in the same district, such as Haywood, Norwood, Woodstock, Grovehurst, Hurst Hill, Kemsley, and the interestin Wildmarsh, which is significantly close to Chetham and probably means 'weald marsh . It is likely that much, if not most, of this forest was cleared before the end of the Roman period; It is traversed by Watling Street and thickly strewn with Roman remains. The survival of the four ceto names within it is therefore of more than ordinary interest. 14 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT or forest was to these southern counties. Now that so much of the area is readily accessible to London, that fact may be difficult for us to realize: yet, accept it we must, if we are to arrive at any valid understanding of early Kentish history. As for the uses to which the Kentish woodlands have been put, these have naturally varied widely from place to place, from time to time, and according to the type of tree-cover. You do not find beechwood, for example, much used in house-building, although in Kent you may find sweet chestnut, which is one of our commonest trees, as well as elmwood and the traditional oak. Timber, of course, was the basic raw material of this country until well into the nineteenth century, and a most interesting book remains to be written on its multifarious uses over the past 1,500 years. Amongst the more important of these uses in Kent were the building of ships; the construction of houses, mills, and farm-buildings; the manufacture of carts, waggons, and farm gear; the making of hoppoles, sheep-hurdles, fences, and pit-props; the burning of charcoal; and the use of oak- and beech-mast for pannage for livestock. Amongst the more modern woodcrafts peculiar to the county, one might mention the Tunbridge-ware industry, a specialized type of marquetry manufacture whose origins derived from the exceptionally varied kinds of wood growing wild in the vicinity of Tunbridge Wells during its rise to fame as a watering-place. It is perhaps the development of hop-farming which has led to the most widespread change in the silvicultural history of the county in recent centuries. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was the practice to train every hop-bine up its own pole, instead of on strings, and until the invention of creosote hop-poles required more frequent renewal than nowadays. Every acre of hop-ground, therefore, needed many hundreds of poles, and when the area under hops reached its maximum of about 45,000 acres in the mid-nineteenth century, an immense acreage of coppice woodland, cropped every thirteen years or so, was needed to sustain it. Since then, the needs and uses of coppice have fluctuated widely. The export of pit-props in their millions to the North Country coalfields in the nineteenth century arose directly out of the decline in demand for hop-poles, and the development of spile fencing in the twentieth out of the decline in demand from the coalfields. But, despite these changes, the fact that there is still far more coppice woodland in Kent than in any other county - nearly 75,000 acres - is in all probability chiefly attributable to the development of hop-farming. There are scores of Kentish parishes where the old coppices remain although their use has been forgotten and the hop-gardens themselves have long since vanished. The fifth characteristic of the Kentish landscape, as I see it, is partly associated with the extent of woodland: and this is the importance of 15 A. M. EVERITT livestock and pasture/and in the economy of the county. Historically speaking, there is abundant evidence for this fact not only in written records but in the place-names and the road-system of the shire. It is perhaps not generally realized that Kent has for long been the least arable and most pastoral of the corn-growing counties of England, 22• and it is possible that this has always been the case. That is not to say that there have not always been important arable areas in the county, particularly on the foothills and in the Isle of Thanet. But whereas in 1900 (for example) about half the area of all the eastern counties of England from the East Riding to Essex was under crops, in Kent the comparable figure was less than one quarter.m That was at the depth of the agricultural depression, it is true; but, in the mid-nineteenth century also, the proportion of cornland in Kent, at 34 per cent, was well below that of the leading arable counties, such as Essex with 51 per cent, Suffolk with 52 per cent, and Cambridgeshire with 57 per cent.220 In more recent centuries, the emphasis in pastoral farming in Kent has always been on sheep; in earlier times, before the Conquest, it was on swine and perhaps cattle. When reasonably reliable statistics of livestock first became available, in the Agricultural Returns of 1866, there were more than 730,000 sheep in Kent, or nearly 200,000 more sheep than people. That figure was exceeded in only two other counties, Lincolnshire and Devon, both of which are considerably larger than Kent. Subsequently, the figure increased considerably and, in 1870, it is said to have amounted to about 1,120,000. So rapid a growth since 1866 is difficult to accept, but certainly during the agricultural depression of 22• Defined as the East Riding, Lines., Northants., Oxon., Berks., Hants., and all the counties to the east of these. The eighteen counties in question roughly, though not exactly, correspond to the 'Lowland Zone' of England. 221> Darby, op. cit., 686. 220 The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, [1868], xii, Appendix, p. 4. The figures for Sussex and Surrey, at 36 per cent, were close to those for Kent. During the Napoleonic Wars, however, as is arued below, there was a considerable extension of arable farming in parts of Kent, and 1t is possible that for a time cornland exceeded pasture. This view appears to be supported by the map of 'Land Use circa 1800' in Darby, op. cit., 405. Unfortunately, this map needs to be viewed with a good deal of caution. It is based on B. P. Capper, A Statistical Account of the Population and Cultivation ..• of Eng/afld and Wales, 1801, 'supplemented by the county General Views of the Board of Agriculture'. The latter at any rate vary widely in usefulness and reliability from county to county and their evidence is anything but systematic. William Marshall had no difficulty in exposing the limitations of the volume for Kent, by John Boys of Betteshanger. Boys, it seems, knew little of central or west Kent and his own district, in the vicinity of Deal, was admittedly a predominantly arable area. Regarding this area, he was well qualified to speak, but not for the county as whole. Does the unsystematic nature of the General Views partially explain some of the surprising anomalies of the map? It is hard to believe, for example, that only about one-third of Essex or Suffolk was under corn but about two-thirds of Staffordshire and HerefordsWre. The map also contains some obvious mistakes. The 'county acreage' of Kent is shewn as less than that of Dorset, Cornwall, and Staffordshire, and much less than that of Sussex or Suffolk: it was, of course, larger than any of these counties. 16 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT ·the later nineteenth century the figure hovered around the million mark.23 Since then, as everywhere else, the number has declined greatly; but in the 1950s, despite extensive ploughing of pasture during the war and its aftermath, there were still more sheep to the acre in Kent than in any other county except Cumberland, Northumberland, and the Pennine area of Yorkshire.24 How far back the predominance of sheep can be definitely traced in the economy of Kent it is more difficult to say: there are no government statistics to help us. But it is certain that farming has always been based predominantly on sheep in the marshlands and in areas like the Isle of Sheppey, whose name of course simply means 'sheep island' and goes back well into the Anglo-Saxon period. 25 The evidence for the importance of swine in the economy of Kent before the Conquest is well-known. It consists in the fact that the whole of the Kentish Weald, together with some smaller stretches of woodland in the east and north-west of the county, formed the swine-pastures of the Jutish kingdom. This fact is still apparent in the extraordinary prevalence of Wealden place-names terminating in -den, signifying a swine-pasture, of which more than 500 have been recorded. Swinepastures in the forest were a feature of Anglo-Saxon England generally, wherever oakwoods or beechwoods predominated; they were in no sense a peculiarity of Kent. But the Weald was a larger stretch of forest than most similar areas; in Kent alone, it extends for upwards of forty miles from east to west; and there is no other area of England with the same concentration of names ending in -den, or where the swine-pastures of a primitive people have left so marked an effect on the modern landscape. In this connexion, it is worth pointing out that although at many points the early history of Sussex closely mirrors that of Kent, and despite the fact that the Sussex Weald was utilized as a pastoral region in much the same way as that of Kent, the dens become relatively infrequent as soon as one has crossed the county boundary. That fact in itself is an indication that, although the two kingdoms developed equally early and in many ways along similar lines, they also developed independently of · one another: from different origins, under different auspices, and with partially distinct linguistic traditions. The swine-pastures of the Weald have also left their mark on the road system of Kent. With a few obvious exceptions, such as the Roman Watling Street and the Pilgrims' Way, most of the old roads and tracks of the county still display a marked tendency to run across the grain of 13 The figures for 1870 are taken from the generally very reliable Imperial Gaze/leer, ( 1871), iii, 1084-S. It is there stated that there were about 300,000 sheep of a superior Jong-woolled breed fed on the marshes, and 'about 820,000 other sheep ... pastured on the downs.' Is 820,000 perhaps a misprint for 520,000? 2• Garrad, op. cit., 144. l$ Sheppey is recorded in one of the earliest Kentish charters, probably dating from the late seventh century. - Wallenberg, Kentlsh Place-Names, 21. 17 A. M. EVERITT DROVEWAYS ANO TRACKS CROSSING THE DOWNLAND J;__"_..,''"_ _ , ! CONTOUflS tt 100' INllRI/At PH.GRIMS' WAY DflOV(WAYS tlMf TFIIACKS h1tt1t flo,,.1♦ CHURCH SI TE t OflUHWAY - E.1:1e,n1,to,uc• Co!'l)tUll•II "-o'lltfl - - • • COfljKtUt .. fklul:• Crown Copyright resened Fig. 2. the county, from north-east to south-west, often descending the escarpments of the Downs and the Stone Hills by narrow, twisting holloways. It is still difficult to travel directly for any distance east and west along the Downs. By car, it is often quicker to descend to the A2 or A20 - the latter a creation of the turnpike era designed to obviate the absence of roads running east and west - and then return to the hills nearer to one's destination. These difficulties, which have happily preserved the remoteness of much of the Downland, are not due to the perversities of the rolling English drunkard, as Chesterton would have it. They arise from the fact that early Kentish society, in the centuries leading up to the Norman Conquest, was based essentially on the practice of transhy.mance. Certainly many, and probably most, of those sunken lanes running across the grain of the county to the south-west are 18 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT in fact the droveways of a people whose swineherds, during the summer months, migrated with their herds from the settlements north of the Downs to their detached pasture-lands in the Weald and Romney Marsh. In a number of cases, as at Kettleshill near Under River, these lanes are still locally referred to as 'the Drove' or 'the Drift', although the expression has not often found its way on to the Ordnance Survey map and its topographical significance is now rarely recognized by those who use it Whether or not the expression itself survives, there are still many places in Kent where these droveways can be traced on the map and in the field with reasonable certainty. The pasture of the men of Ospringe, near Faversham, for example, is known to have been situated at Tilden, fifteen miles away to the south-west in the Wealden parish of Headcorn. Although Tilden, like most dens of its kind, subsequently became an independent farm and so remains to this day, the old droveway linking it to Ospringe may stiU be traced by means of lanes, tracks, and parish boundaries from the point near Ospringe where it leaves Watling Street direct to Tilden itself. There is only one stretch of a few hundred yards where it has disappeared, at the marshy spot where it crosses the water meadows of the infant River Len by the aptly-named Water Lane. Further west, the detached pasture of the men of Meopham was situated twelve miles to the south in the Tonbridge area, no doubt in the vicinity of Meopham Bank in that parish. In this case there are two possible droveways that may have been used, one by way of Culverstone Green and Wrotham, the other by Stansted and Ightham, the two uniting at Bewley Bar above Fairlawne and proceeding together to Meopham Bank by High Cross, Tinley Lodge, and Coldharbour. Further west again, the summer pasture land of Lewisham, Woolwich, and Greenwich lay nearly thirty miles away on the borders of Surrey and Sussex and gave its name to the Hundred of Somerden, which simply means 'summer pasture'. The name of Somerden still survives in the farm-settlements of Somerden and Somerden Green in the parish of Chiddingstone, from which droveways still lead northwards over the Stone Hills and the Downland escarpment near Sundridge. The name of Sundridge itself is worth noting in this context, for it means 'sundered or separated pasture', though we cannot be certain in this case which place it was attached to and it is not in the Weald itself but on the wooded dipslope of the Stone Hills. It may be that, like Somerden, it was attached to the Lewisham district, as an enclosed pasture-farm or halting-place halfway to the distant Wealden pastures. In that case, it would have some parallel with Thanington in east Kent, which means the tun of the men of Thanet and lies fifteen ·miles or so along the road between Thanet and its Wealden swine-pasture at Tenterden - the droveden of the men of Thanet. In both cases, at Tenterden and Somerden, the pasture is sited 19 A. M. EVERITT unusually far from the parent community, at Tenterden more than 40 miles away. Lewisham, Woolwich, and Greenwich, it will be observed, have no connexion with London at this early period but look firmly southwards for their livelihood to the forest country around Sundridge and Somerden. In Kent, then, more obviously than in many parts of England, we have a landscape which has been largely shaped by the needs of a pastoral society based upon the practice of transhumance. Although with the permanent settlement of most of the Weald between about 1050 and 1300 this practice was on the wane, certain vestiges of it still survived as late as the seventeenth century. The Weald itself had by then ceased to be used as an area of detached pasture; but Romney Marsh was still wholly pastoral and some of the upland shepherds used to migrate with their sheep-flocks in springtime to spend the summer months in their 'old removable houses' or 'summer lodges' in the Marsh, just as the Swiss cowherds today still migrate to their mountain pastures with the melting of the snows.26 In a sense, perhaps, these customs may be said to influence farming practice today: the shepherds no longer move southwards with their flocks themselves, but the sheep are still often wintered in the upland country of Kent and then sent down to the marshland with the advent of spring. Transhumance was not of course a peculiarity of Kent. It was a wellknown feature of early Celtic society and it certainly obtained elsewhere in the Highland Zone of England. Recently, important evidence for its existence has been coming to light in parts of the Lowland Zone of England, too, apart from Kent, for example in Warwickshire, where analogical arguments from the Kentish evidence raise some interesting questions regarding early English society in general. 27 But there are several reasons why we know more about the practice of transhumance in Kent than in most other areas. The first is the unusual abundance of Anglo-Saxon charter material for the county, particularly for the estates of the great religious houses of Canterbury and Rochester. The second derives from the fact that, more than in most areas, an archaic form of society lies fossilized, so to speak, in both the landscape and the parochial, manorial, and tenurial structure of the county. The reasons for this survival are complex and cannot be discussed in this paper; perhaps the most important is the well-known fact that at the Conquest the county retained the basis of its own distinctive legal system, the last relics of which were not abolished until the 1920s. Whatever the reasons, 26 An 'old removable house' in Romney Marsh is mentioned in the probate inventory of Stephen Hulkes, of Newnham, in the Kent Archives Office. 27 See, W. J. Ford, The Pattern of Settlement in the Central Region of the Warwickshire Avon, Leicester Univ. M.A. thesis, (1973), 41-57. This is an important study and Mr Ford draws a number of suggestive parallels with Kent. 20 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT the outlines of this ancient structure survived, by the greatest good fortune, until Edward Hasted took up his pen in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It was these vestiges, moreover, that particularly interested his somewhat dry and legalistic mind. Cautiously interpreted, and notwithstanding its errors of detail, his History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent is perhaps the most important single record we have for unlocking the secrets of the early settlement history of the shire. It is to the successive phases of that settlement history, from the fifth century to the eighteenth, that I now turn. IV. PHASES OF SETTLEMENT Amongst the characteristic phrases of Hasted's History, occurring in many parts of the county, we find such expressions as 'the parish of A has ever been accounted but as a chapelry of the parish of B'; or 'this manor of C claims paramount over the manors of D and E'; or again 'the patronage of this living has ever been estimated as an appendage to the manor'; and so on. Such phrases as these, and others of a similar kind, are worth pondering. When placed alongside other evidence and interpreted in the light of place-names, charters, maps, and topography, they frequently indicate not only the specific relationship of one settlement to another in the early phases of Kentish society, but also the general direction of settlement in the history of the county. This general direction or movement of sett lement, from the north and north-east across the grain of the county towards the south and south-west, is one of the most striking features of the Kentish landscape. Not that there are no exceptions to the general rule: there are, and some of them are suggestive, such as the puzzling relationship of Hastingleigh on the Downs above Wye to its parent settlement at Hastings in Sussex. Nevertheless, when every exception has been admitted, it remains true to say that the overwhelming trend of settlement in Kent is from north to south. That is why there are five Suttons in the county but only two Nortons and no Eastons or W estons. 21• Speaking very broadly, the earliest settlements in Kent tend to be found in one or other of three areas. Many are sited on the fertile foothills, in that long tract of gently undulating country near the coast whih is traversed by the great Roman road from London to Canterbury 27• Sutton Valence, East Sutton, Sutton-at-Hone, Sutton Baron, and Sutton by Dover. (Chart Sutton, which appears to be a sixth case, is actually Chart-next-Sutton.) Of the two Nortons, Norton Court in Chart Sutton is not relevant in the context of settlement direction; a third Norton, Norton Green in Stockbury, is strictly speaking North+ denn (pasture). Though there is no Easton in Kent, there is an Eastchurch, so called because it lies east of its mother-church, Sheppey Minster. 21 A. M. EVERITT and Richborough.27b Secondly, many are found in the river valleys running inland from this countryside, along the Great Stour, Little Stour, Medway, Darent, and Cray. Thirdly, there is a long line of early settlements, though perhaps not often quite so early as these, along the scarp-foot of the Downs, close to the Pilgrims' Way though not often directly on it. In a sense, this last group of places may be regarded as an extension of the second group, since owing to the configuration of the landscape the headwaters of the Stour and the Darent and several tributaries of the Medway, such as the Len, in fact run parallel to the Downland edge, so that many scarp-foot settlements also lie close to these rivers. From the first of these groups of places, settlement tended to push southwards, up into the wooded recesses of the Downs; from the last, it pressed southwards into the woodlands of the Stone Hills or Chartlands; from all three groups, the herdsmen moved each summer into the drovedens of the Weald; and, eventually, these summer pastures themselves gave rise to independent settlements of their own. The whole of this complex process of colonization in Kent was a very gradual one. From first to last, it extended over the best part of a thousand years, commencing in the fifth century and ceasing only with the drastic decline of population in the fourteenth: as long a period, in fact, as separates us from the age of William the Conqueror. By the fourteenth century, however, the basic colonization of the county was virtually complete. There were three subsequent periods which saw widespread changes in local settlement - the end of the Middle Ages, the end of the sixteenth century, and the end of the eighteenth - and to these I shall return a little later. But the fact remains that the general framework of colonization had been completed by the time of the Black Death. By that date, although there were still numerous stretches of common, woodland and waste, there was no region of the county that remained wholly uncolonized, and there were no new parishes created until the nineteenth century. All subsequent changes in the settlement pattern of Kent, dramatic though some of them were, were fitted into the established structure without fundamentally altering its outlines, although they greatly modified the distribution of population. 27b This was the original main route, and Richborough the principal Roman port: it was only subsequently that Dover took over that position. The present A2, from London to Dover, changes alignment markedly at Canterbury. It is significant that none of the early settlements in Kent lies on the Dover-Canterbury stretch of the A2: Bridge is a late Saxon settlement, and is not recorded before Domesday Book (Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kem, 541). The contrast is striking with the numerous early settlements near the road from Canterbury to Richborough, such as Littlebourne and Ickham. 27< For some detailed examples and maps of settlement direction bearing on th!s paragraph see, Alan Everitt, Ways and Means in Local History, (1971), 14-17. It 1s sometimes said that the Lathe of St. Augustine had no Wealden pastures. This is not strictly correct - Tenterden was the den of the men of Thanet - but they do seem to have been more limited than those of the more westerly lathes. 22 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT The fact that it had taken so long in Kent to complete that structure needs to be firmly grasped. It has sometimes been implied, by historians who should have known better, that the early English colonists settled one territory more or less completely before pressing on to the next. So far as Kent is concerned there could certainly be no greater error. 28 Between the lines of the early colonists' penetration, we must envisage whole tracts of countryside which for centuries were left virtually bare of permanent settlement by the English, though they may well have harboured vanquished o r fugitive Britons. In few regions of the Lowland Zone did those tracts remain so extensive and so long uncolonized as in Kent and Sussex, where the Weald of Andred effectively divided the original settlements of the two kingdoms by forty miles of forest. As a result of this complex process of settlement, by 1300 or thereabouts, there had emerged three distinct types of settlement or community in Kent, each of them originating in a different period, and each giving rise to a distinct type of parish. Not that all Kentish parishes can be made to fit into this pattern with perfect precision; for, since the process of settlement had been so long drawn out, no two parishes were identical and probably few were strictly contemporaneous. Nevertheless, behind the infinite variations of locale, it is possible to discern a distinctive pattern, a pattern, moreover, which is to some extent echoed in a number of other English counties. First, there were the very early primary settlements of the county, which have already been alluded to. These tended to give rise to comparatively large parishes, often of as much as 4,000 or 5,000 acres and occasionally, as at Wye, more than 7,000. The scale of these primary parishes in Kent is not a local peculiarity but was to some extent characteristic of other parts of the country, too, for example Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire. As primary settlements, such places were in a powerful position to retain control over much of their original territory, and to cede as little as possible to their daughter-communities when these came to be created on their outlying lands in a later phase of colonization. In Kent, there is reason to think that these very early places generally originated as settlements of a community, of a 'tribe' or 'people', rather than of isolated individuals or families, so that it is in them, if anywhere, that we may expect to find genuinely nucleated villages from a very early 28 Mr. F. W. Jessup's wise words, in his History of Kent, 30, will bear quoting in this context: 'The fact that few British place-names survive seems at first sight to support the tradition that the Britons either fled or were exterminated, but in some other parts of the country, where British survival is known from archaeological evidence, British place• names are scanty. In Saxon times the population of Kent was probably well under 50,000, so there must have been ample room for two races to dwell in the region without coming into perpetual conflict, especially if, as seems not unlikely, the Britons for the most part kept to the hills and the Jutes to the valleys.' 23 A. M. EVERITI period. It is impossible to be certain that they originated as villages, since most of them, as already remarked, at a later date became market towns and that development may account for their nucleation; but it is a possibility, which in the present state of knowledge must not be ruled out. That they were settlements of a community or 'tribe' rather than of individual settlers is in many cases borne out by the form of their placenames. Eastry, for example, contains the very early element ge, meaning a 'district' or regio, and its earliest recorded form, Eastrgena in 788, is the genitive plural of a derivative meaning 'the Eastry people'.29 Or take Maidstone, a difficult name like so many in Kent, but probably containing the primitive Old English word magd, signifying a 'folk', 'tribe', or 'people'. Folkestone, another very early place, is a doublet of Maidstone, meaning the 'stone of the people, or folk'.30 Lyminge and Sturry both contain the same suggestive element ge as Eastry and combine it with a Celtic river name of great antiquity, namely Limen and Stour.31 The second type of settlement to develop in the colonization of Kent is more characteristic of the middle and later phases of the Anglo-Saxon period. These subsequent settlements, if I may so describe them, are particularly characteristic of the Downland areas of Kent and form a distinctive class of their own. The parishes they give rise to are generally quite small, rarely amounting to more than 2,000 acres and not infrequently to less than 1,000. They do not seem to have originated as settlements of a tribe or a substantial community but rather as the isolated farms or dwelling-places of a single family or landowner, or as discrete groupings of more or less independent farms. Many of them, there is reason to think, probably originated as the outlying stock-farms of the primary settlements, established in clearings of the Downland forest; then, at a slightly later date, they became independent holdings, perhaps worked by the younger sons of the old community, as population increased and drove them to seek a separate livelihood of their own. One of the commonest elements in the place-names of these subsequent settlements in Kent is the word stead, and Dr. Karl Sandred has argued, in a closely-reasoned study, that this word almost certainly indicates a stock-farm. Altogether, there are about sixty place-names of this type in Kent, more than in any other county, and almost all of them are situated high up on the Downland in the classic position of subsequent settlements. 32 29 Eilert Ekwall, The Concise 04ord Dictionary of English Place-Names, 3rd edn, (1947), 151. 30 Smith, op. cit., ii, 32; Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kent, 140,445. 31 Ekwall, op. cit., 294, 430. 32 K. I. Sandred, English Place-Names in -stead, 1963: see especially, 166-75. Dr. Sandred (p. 14) gives the total number of -stead names in Kent as 48, but this relates only to those recorded before 1500. I have noted about IS further examples. The next highest figures are: Essex 28, Sussex 21, Surrey 21, and Suffolk 15. 24 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT The origins of the subsequent settlements in Kent as farmsteads of a single family or landowner have in many cases coloured their subsequent history. In a sense they were really 'manorial' foundations in origin, if an anachronistic term may be permitted, rather than settlements of a community of small freeholders. Even today, they rarely contain any kind of village. Their churches stand isolated by their manor houses or 'court lodges', and in most cases the patronage of their livings was, in Hasted's phrase, 'ever esteemed as an appendage to the manor'. 3 2 " It is largely in consequence of these facts that the Downland region of Kent has remained throughout its history the preserve of those minor manorial gentry who have always been so characteristic of the county. In the nineteenth century, four Downland parishes in five were still controlled by armigerous families of this kind, whereas the old primary settlements from which they had originated were still, by and large, communities of small freeholders. 3 In these respects, there are few areas of England where landscape and society have till recently remained so firmly moulded by their distant past as the Downland countryside of Kent. The third type of settlement to be found in Kent arose in the 'secondary' or post-Conquest phase of colonization. It is particularly associated with the clearance of the Wealden forest, although it may also be found on the wooded Chartlands and in certain outlying parts of the Downland. Secondary settlement of this kind occurred in many parts of England at this time and it frequently gave rise to very large parishes. Those in Kent sometimes extend to more than 10,000 acres, as at Cranbrook, and in the case of Tonbridge to more than 15,000 acres. Although the origins of this kind of settlement are now known, in Kent at least, to go back before the Conquest, there can be little doubt that the great bulk of it took place between about 1100 and 1300, and that in the main it was probably the work of independent freemen who cleared and enclosed their own farms direct from the forest. The fact, however, that so many farms in the Weald still bear the names of the ancient drovedens of the Jutish period suggests that in numerous cases the old summer lodges of the herdsmen formed the nucleus of the new farms, which thus gradually developed from seasonal shielings into permanent abodes. The fully-established farm first recorded in documents of the twelfth or thirteenth century may often, therefore, be the result not of any deliberate act of creation but rather the ultimate stage in a lengthy process of historical evolution. The economic impulse behind this process of secondary colonization stemmed from the rapid rise of population in the centuries following the Conquest. The inhabitants of J20 As, for example, at Otterden: Hasted, op. cit., v, 548. 33 See, Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century, (I 972), 20-22, 59-61, for regional differences in the structure of landownership in Kent and some other counties in the nineteenth century. 25 A. M. EVERITT Kent itself may have trebled in numbers between the Conquest and the early fourteenth century, so that some thousands of new farms then appeared for the first time on the map. Both the subsequent settlements of the Downs and the secondary settlements of the Weald, it will be noted, were associated with the gradual clearance of old forest country. In this respect, the colonization of the Weald can be regarded as continuing a historical process which by 1086 had already been under way on the Downs for four or five centuries, rather than as originating a wholly new phase or type of settlement. It may well be, moreover, that on the Downs the new farms and estates of the middle and later Saxon period often arose out of the old summer shielings of the herdsmen, much as they did at a later date in the Weald. And certainly it is important not to regard the political changes of the Norman Conquest as inaugurating a wholly new phase in the structure and pattern of colonization. Yet, in the present imperfect state of our knowledge, the differences between Weald and Downland, between subsequent and secondary settlement, also need to be recognized, although they cannot yet be adequately explained. Not only is the scale and kind of parish to which forest clearance gave rise different in the two regions: the typology of place-names is also distinct, and the kind of society to which the two phases of settlement gave rise is essentially dissimilar. Relatively speaking, the Downland was a strongly manorialized area, whereas the Weald, like other late-settled forests, was much less so. Whereas the Downland, moreover, remained till the nineteenth century the classic preserve of the landed gentry, the Weald was predominantly the home of the smaller independent freeholder, in fact as well as legend the preserve by and large, for many centuries, of the Kentish yeomen or 'greycoats'. Although the framework of colonization in Kent had been completed by the middle of the fourteenth century, when secondary settlement of the kind described came to an end, it would not be true to say, as it would in much of the Midlands, that the settlement of the county had then reached its terminus ad quern. Owing chiefly to the fact that there was still a good deal of woodland in Kent, there were, as already indicated, three subsequent periods when further colonization of the waste took place, although this colonization was fitted into the old structure and did not give rise to the creation of any new parishes until the nineteenth century.330 Each of these three periods coincided, as we should expect, with a rapid increase of population, and much of this new population seems to have been absorbed by existing communities; but in· 33•During the Civil War period Plaxtol and Stansted were for a time formed into separate parishes, but they reverted to their original status as chapelries of Wrotham after the Restoration. Three of the earliest new chapelries to be formed in the nineteenth century were Sevenoaks Weald (1820), Riverhead (1831), and Dunkirk (after 1838); but they did not become independent parishes till considerably later. 26 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT the country districts of Kent, it also led to the foundation of new hamlets and isolated farms, although probably not on the same scale as in the centuries following the Conquest Perhaps the most striking characteristics of these later phases of settlement, however, were the increase of wealth with which they were associated and the shifts of emphasis they brought about in the regional distribution of population in the county. The first of these three periods occurred towards the end of the Middle Ages, and in terms of local demographic statistics virtually nothing is known about it: all we know is its pronounced effect upon the landscape. In some parts of the county it may have continued without a break into the second period, which occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Between them these two periods witnessed the rise of Kent from a comparatively modest status in terms of taxable capacity per square mile to one of exceptional wealth. They also saw the singularly early commencement and unusual scale of the Great Rebuilding in the county, if indeed it is not more appropriate to speak of two Great Rebuildings, one in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and a second in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Finally, they witnessed the rise of the Weald from one of the poorest and most sparsely populated parts of the county to become the richest and most densely settled, apart from the foothills which remained, as they always had been, the wealthiest and most populous of all. 34 The reasons behind these far-reaching changes in Kent between 1450 and 1650 are at present profoundly obscure. The cloth and iron industries of the Weald, those convenient dei ex machina, are often cited in explanation, and no doubt they played a major part. But the fact is that, although a good deal of work has been done on this period, much of it has been of a piecemeal character and we still need a whole shelf-full of systematic monographs on the topography, the agriculture, the estate management, the vernacular building, the industrial structure, the social structure, and a dozen other subjects in the history of the county before the changes of the late medieval and early modern period can be fully understood. 340 The purpose of mentioning them in these pages is simply to indicate the new waves of settlement to which they give rise, particularly in the form of squatters' settlements and cottagers' communities at such places as Kennington Lees and Longbridge Lees, near Ashford, or J4 For figures of the regional distribution of population in Kent in the 1670s see my analysis of the Compton Census in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, v1. 1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk, (1967), 410. The area described as the foothills in this paper is there called the 'Lower Downland'm The part of the Census relating to Kent is edited by Mr. C. W. Chalklin in A. Seve11tee111h Century Miscella11y, Kent Arch:Soc., Records Publ.ication Committee, xvii, (1960), 153-74. 34•An exceptionally illuminating study in the field of vernacular architecture is Mr. S. E. Rigold's pioneering article, 'Some Major Kentish Timber Barns', in Arch. Cant., hood (1966), 1-30. We need more general surveys of this kind. 27 A. M. EVERITT Stelling Minnis on the borders of Elham and Lyminge in east Kent. An exhaustive examination of the county, parish by parish, would probably enable us to date the origin of a large number of new hamlet settlements in Kent to this period, particularly those like Kennington Lees and Stelling Minnis that are sited on small patches of heath, common, or waste. In many cases, it is at present difficult to assign any definite date to places of this kind, since they do not figure in the early medieval documents upon which W allenberg based most of his work on Kentish place-names and they are not otherwise normally recorded in bis pages. One thinks of places like Godden Green in Seal, for instance, first distinctly recorded by Wallenberg in a document of 1516.35 It may be to this same period, one suspects, that we must assign the first expansion of many older settlements, which had originated early in the Middle Ages as isolated farms, into those charming little 'streets' or 'forstals', to use the local expressions, that are still a marked feature of the county. The final period of new settlement in Kent, as in Sussex, occurred very late and coincided with the unprecedented growth of population in the second half of the eighteenth century. After a time of relative stagnation between 1650 and 1750, the population of the county appears to have almost doubled between 17 50 and 1801. 36 This was a rate of growth exceptional in southern or eastern England and without parallel in the history of Kent; but once again very little is known at present about either its local causes or its consequences in the county as a whole. It continued in the rural areas of Kent till well into the nineteenth century, 37 3356 W allenberg, Place-Names ofK ent, 64. The population of Kent at the Census of 1801 was 317,442: see, Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure, 1967 edn., 103. The same authors give the figure for 1751 as I 68,679. This is based on the Rickman estimates, whose general reliability is of course much debated; but Deane and Cole (101) seem to feel that the figure for Kent is reasonably near the mark, so that the rate of increase to 1801 was 88 per cent. Rickman's estimate for Kent in 1701 was 155,694, so that there was very little growth by comparison in the first half of the eighteenth century. In only one southern county did the rate of increase in the second half of the century exceed that of Kent, namely Surrey, where the population increased by 108 per cent from 133,427 to 277,630. This extraordinary rise in Surrey was no doubt largely due to the rapid growth of London south of the river: as explained above, the whole of the continuously built-up transpontine part of the capital was in Surrey at this time. Essex, by contrast, which was more populous than Kent in 1751 (180,465) grew exceptionally slowly in the second half of the century, and had only 233,664 inhabitants in 1801, a rate of increase of only 29 per cent. This was less than that of Dorset or Buckinghamshire, where there was an increase of 35 per cent. In the other southern counties the rate of growth came nearest to that of Kent m Sussex (74 per cent) and Hampshire (68 per cent). The increase in Kent was of course partly due to the growth of places near London, like Deptford and W oolwich, but by no means chiefly so. Although we have no precise figures, parish by parish, there cannot be any serious doubt that it was a general phenomenon throughout most of the county, though growth may have been relatively slit in the Marshland and on the Downland. 7 The census fiures for each parish from 1801 to· 192 I are summarized in the Victoria County History, Kent, iii (1932), 358. The population for the whole county in 1801 is given as 308,667 in the V.C.H. and thus differs by some 9,000 from the figure given by Deane and Cole, op. cit., as cited in the previous footnote. 28 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT and the whole period from 1750 to 1830 or 1840 probably saw greater changes in the rural landscape than at any comparable time since the colonization of the Weald in the generations following the Conquest. These changes cannot be explored in any detail here; but some of the more important need to be mentioned for the effect they had upon the local settlement pattern. Amongst them, for example, were the expansion of old hamlets to form small 'green' villages, as at Throwley Forstal; the filling-in of medieval street-migrations to form sizable nucleated communities, as at Boughton-under-Blean; the development of wholly new street-migrations, as at Highgate on the Rye road in Hawkhurst;38 the foundation of further squatters' settlements, often on parish boundaries, as at Brabourne Lees;39 the establishment of new farms on the edge of ancient woodland, as at Kettlebender in Waltham; the extension of cornland on the chalk, in places to the very crest of the Downs, as at Little Betsoms on the 800-ft. contour near Westerham; and, in consequence, the clearance of millions of flints from the fields, which were often used to build the new barns and farmhouses. The creation of new farms in Kent at this time coincided with the better-known and more widespread rebuilding of farmhouses in the Midland counties. But the impulse behind the movement in the two regions was distinct. In the Midlands, it was. parliamentary enclosure of the common fields, in the name of more efficient farming, that generally provided the motive force. In Kent, there were now no fields of this kind to enclose and new farms were rarely the result of agricultural improvement. Probably, most of them were founded under the intense economic pressures of the Napoleonic War period, when the difficulties of importing foodstuffs coincided with the unprecedented growth of 38 The oldest building at Highgate is Sir Thomas Dunk's school and almshouses of 1723. The place developed mainly through the coaching trade of the later eighteenth century; it was essentially an inn-settlement, situated a mile away from the original HawkhursL 39 In Hasted's time Brabourne Lees was a rabbit-warren: see his History and Topographical Survey, viii, 15. His map shews only two houses on it, the Warren House and Lodge House. In Kentish usage a lees or leaze is usually a stretch of common pasture on a parish boundarr.- The settlements that grew up at such places were usually late in date and more or less illicit in origin: see my remarks regarding Longbridge Leaze near Ashford, in Thirsk, op. cit., 445-6, where in James I's reign two poor men erected cottages 'without any authority or lawful licence' because 'they were destitute of houses and had seen other cottages upon the same waste built by other poor men ... .' At Brabourne Lees, which belonged to the Scotts of Scots' Hal.I in neighbouring Smeeth, the operative date was probably the 1780s, when their estates were sold after a lengthy period of decline in the family fortunes. There was also apparently a barracks on the site during the Napoleonic Wars and some of the present buildings may date from that period. By 1818, the settlement was large enough to build its own Baptist chapel, which still survives and is actually on the parish boundary. In the rural areas of Kent, Nonconformity is frequently associated with settlements of this kind. 39• Most of the flint farm buildings of Kent date from this period and not before: a marked contrast with Norfolk, where flint was widespread by a much earlier date, no doubt because timber was in shorter supply than in Kent. 29 A. M. EVERITT population. No doubt many of them were always marginal settlements, as their situation and their nomenclature indicate. Several, for example, bear names like Starvecrow, Starveall, Mockbeggar, whilst Kettlebender derives its odd name from the humorous local word for a tinker, that most despised member of rural society. Medieval people had known quite well what they were doing when they left such unprofitable lands as these uncultivated, and many of the new farms have subsequently fallen back again to waste. At Filchborough, near Kettlebender - the farm of the £itches or polecats - the barns are in ruins, the house has vanished, . the well is empty, and the site a wilderness of brambles and briars.40 Of all the changes in the rural landscape of Kent during this final period · of settlement, perhaps the most widespread was the Great Rebuilding of labourers' cottages. This was a development which was closely connected with the rapid extension of arable land, the growth of fruit- and hop-farming, and a probably massive increase in the labouring population. In Kent, as in other counties, there are few genuine labourers' cottages dating from much before the mid-eighteenth century; those that are so called are in fact usually the houses of yeomen, husbandsmen, or craftsmen. But all over Kent today, particularly in the east and centre of the county, there are still many farmworkers' cottages dating from the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century: often built in little rows of three or four, sometimes standing alone on the edge of a field or wood, the earlier ones usually constructed as single-storeyed dwellings, and perhaps most of them, except on the Stone Hills, built of timber and covered with tiles or weatherboard. Such little cottage-rows as these are comparatively rare in Midland counties like Leicestershire, except within the old villages; but in Kent, they immediately strike an observant visitor. They remain as silent witnesses to a period in Kentish history when the whole agricultural population of the county seems to have increased dramatically, and when more was spent on poor relief than in any other county but Middlesex.41 •° Kettlebender is not recorded by Wallenberg, and I am indebted to Mr. John Dodgson for information about it. Filchborough or Fitchborough is first recorded by Hasted in 1728 (op. cit., vii, 377), but its building remains appear to date from a later period, perhaps the Napoleonic Wars. W alien berg attempts no explanation of it, and for the above interpretation I am again indebted to Mr. Dodgson. The fact that the polecat still survived in the woodland areas of east Kent at this time should be noted as an evidence of their remoteness. Nowadays, the polecat is confined to Scotland and the northern counties of England, where it is very rare. None of the Starvecrow, Starveall, or Mockbeggar names in Kent, of which there are several, is recorded by Wallenberg: presumably all of them are relatively late. 41 Elizabeth Melling, ed., Kentlsh Sources, iv, The Poor, (1964), 147-8. The amount spent on poor relief rose from £77,895 in 1776 to £213,989 in 1803 and £399,201 for the year ending 25 March, 1818. It remained at about that level for several years. The last figure represented nearly £ I per head of population. Middlesex spent about twice as much as Kent, but it had five times the population, so that the per capita expenditure was less than half as great. Sussex and Essex also spent very heavily on poor relief, more per head of population in fact than Kent, though the total figure was smaller. 30 THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT V. CONCLUSION In concentrating attention in this article on a few broad themes in the settlement history of Kent, one is conscious of having left aside much indeed that has gone towards the making of the landscape as we still know it. Nothing has been said of the origin of Kentish towns or the unusual number of new towns founded since the sixteenth century. Nothing has been said of the effect of partible inheritance upon the landscape, and the development of those delightful little farm-clusters that are so characteristic of the county. Nothing has been said of the buildings and building materials of Kent which, like its geology, are exceptionally varied and distinctive. Nothing has been said of the rise of the professional families and landless gentry of the shire who, since the eighteenth century, have left so marked an impress on its urban and rural architecture. Nothing has been said of the great emparking movement of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose evidence survives in the remains of more than 200 pleasure grounds. Nothing has been said of the maritime influences in the county, which are so plain to see not only along the seacoast but in the family monuments in scores of Kentish churches. Nothing has been said of the nineteenth century, when the landed gentry flowered out into a new prosperity, when the old crafts and skills attained their fullest efflorescence, and when the contrasts between poverty and plenty, between the civilized and the primitive, not only remained but in some sense became more pronounced. These subjects, and many others like them, such as the development of fruitgrowing and hop-cultivation, are not less interesting or important than those that have been touched on. All one can say is, as others have said before me: so much to do, so little done. 31
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