The Norman conquerors established the South East as Frontier land, and its landholding was organised accordingly, and medieval centuries saw the rise and fall of the Cinque ports, and the development of the regional economies on the template laid in Anglo Saxon times. The Black Death and the Tudors brought transformation – a to the society and economy of the Weald, and from the increasing intrusion of the beast to the north – London.
Transcript
Hello Members all, and welcome to the second in my trilogy of shedcasts about the South East of England – and more specifically, the fair counties of Kent and Sussex. Last time we managed to trundle our way through some blather about the characteristics of the two, and we had some songs and flags and poems and stuff so that’s nice, and arrived at the eve of the Norman invasion – seems like a plot spoiler to call it the Norman conquest, but I guess you’ve heard it before, so never mind. If I want you to keep one thing at the front of your mind for this episode, it’s two major regional groups – the periphery, close to the coast, and interior. The coastal periphery is where the wealth is; most of the best agricultural land, the towns, the ports, the cathedrals and castles – the people. There are a few principle towns; start with Rochester in north east Kent on the river Medway, then south to Canterbury, round north foreland point onto the south coast and Dover. Travel westwards along the coast to Sussex, pass by multiple ports, and meet the nascent county town of East Sussex, Lewes, and then to West Sussex, with its county town Chichester.
The interior is much more sparsely peopled – the low and High weald, covered with trees. The North and South downs covered with sheep. Many of the small scattered settlements are mainly there just to house people during the summer pasturing.
Now then, I think you almost certainly know about Billy the Conq landing at Pevensey in Sussex in October 1066; he will have planned the location, plenty of Normans had land and trade contacts in the south East – who could advise. Maybe Pevensey was useful because of the Weald to the north of him – a difficult place to force your way through, so he’d buy himself some time before the Anglo Saxons came to check his passport. But also, King Harold had a lot of estates in the area; which immediately suffered mayhem, pillaging and destruction. William was not a gentle man, as the North will also find out.
So the tragedy of Hastings happens, and William marched eastwards into Kent; and the locals fall over themselves to surrender. Not that it does them any good; the town of Dover surrender, so Billy looks at them and says, ‘hmm, thank you’, turn to his own men and yells ‘Burn it to the ground!’. We then get the very first castle at Dover we know about for sure – a wooden Motte and Bailey. It is the start of a very long story of one of the most important castles in England – it’s pretty impressive even now. It’s location is absolutely critical, just across from France. In 1217, just before the naval battle of Sandwich against the French, the justiciar Hubert be Burgh will declare to the young Henry III
Never will I yield to French aliens this castle, which is the very key and Gate of England’
That has stuck – the key and gate of England.
Canterbury chickens out too, and as I say this I can almost touch your sense of bewildered confusion. Hang on just a darned minute there, didn’t you say Kent uses the slogan ‘Invicta!’, under their brave White horse flag? That means undefeated doesn’t it…and here they are, dropping like flies they are.
Well, here’s the tale. As William was marching along the A2 near Swanscombe right in the north of Kent on the Thames, he was met or possibly ambushed by what looked like a wood. A bunch of locals carrying or hiding behind branches and leaves, and armed with farming implements, honestly there are many versions of this story. Well the Kentish Men and Maids threatened to destroy William and his 5000 beefy, well armed professional killers with their wooden trowels. Obviously, the Conqueror turned to run in abject terror, but stopped when they said they’d cut a deal – to preserve their rights and liberties. I mean – obviously William said yes, and thus it is that Kent calls itself Invicta – there is a monument at Swanscombe, erected in 1958. It’s a lovely story; the details are a little hazy, also the monument says 1067 so I am a bit lost but whatever – it’s obviously true.
As a side note, in terms of liberties it is true that the people of Kent would retain a distinctive inheritance custom; rather than inheritance by the oldest son, the land was parcelled out between all of them – gravelkind it is called. I am told that it was not finally abolished until 1925. So maybe they really were invicta.
But the story may instead be linked to Billy’s brother, or half brother, Odo Of Bayeux, but before we talk about the Ravenous wolf, Odiferous Odo, stand by your beds everyone, ready for a long, involved discussion about landholdings. Don’t say I don’t spoil you.
As you may be aware, William claimed every square inch of England belonged to him, by right of conquest. He was able to completely re-organise England and by and large he did it by copying old Anglo Saxon estates and giving them to Normans, which meant they had bits of land all over the shop and would find it difficult to get enough men together in one place to launch a sneaky rebellion. But there were a few areas that were strategic, likely candidates for enemy action. And so in those areas, estates needed to be consolidated, so the local magnate could defend them on the king’s behalf. Famous areas are the Northern Marches, and the Welsh marches. No one talks about the South east marches, because they aren’t really marches in the same way, with the kind of freedoms which means the King’s writ doesn’t run there, but there are some mighty powerful lords set up with consolidated holdings to defend the coast from attack.
So – the Domesday survey shows us that Kent may have about 75,000 people, and over them William set up just three big secular landowners, and tries to keep it in the family – so Odo is one of those. No one likes, Odo, Odo is not a nice man. He steals land all over the place from the locals, rides roughshod over local rights; I suspect this is a story repeated all over the country, but the Conqueror family were high achievers, so he does it best. Maybe this is why the Kentish men and maids picked up their branches and leaves. There is another monster landowner, and in fact the biggest – the Archbishop of Canterbury; in fact a stonking 55% of the land went to the church – roll on the Reformation! And the new man, Lanfranc starts building bigger, better and stonier. There’s very little left of his cathedral these days – except the eastern Crypt, most of it is later medieval – but before long William of Malmesbury would be gushing
Nothing like it could be seen in England either for the light of its glass windows, the gleaming of its marble pavements or the many coloured paintings which led the eyes to the panelled Ceiling above’.
This seems the appropriate point at which to mention a certain event on 29th December 1170, when four blokes innocently asked the question
‘Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and country?’
Within a few moments Henry II was rid of the turbulent priest, and launched Canterbury as a destination site for pilgrims, up there in the first rank alongside Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago, and which inspired Geoffrey Chaucer, of course, to write those stories. You know the ones.
Along with Canterbury, there are many foundations of monasteries, and a complete re-building of churches in stone; Rochester was rebuilt, you know, properly; but Selsey in West Sussex was moved to Chichester. One of the many monasteries I should mention was Battle Abbey, which was established on the battlefield now known as Hastings, as William’s sort of fist bump with God. It came with its own personal region of 3 miles of land around, a luega or lowry, and this reflects that its role was not just saving souls and worshipping God – but providing a first line military defence for its bit of coast. After all we wouldn’t want another conquest would we? A town was established around it, which is very lovely, definitely worth a visit. And you can stand on the very spot where Harold and Old England died. Allegedly the spot, that is to say.
Setting up new towns associated with castle and dedicated landholdings is a Norman thing; and no more so that in Sussex. Sussex at Domesday probably held a population of about 35,000, excluding slaves, spread over about 300 manors. The 4 Rapes of Sussex I mentioned it the last episode were already the template of consolidated landholdings, and the Conqueror knew a good thing when he saw it. So Sussex would become divided into 6 Rapes, based on the old Alfredian burghs – William added a couple more. They are, from the Kent border, Pevensey, Hastings, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel, Chichester. Each forms a strip, from the coast, up to the interior and northern border. Each defends a river valley, with a town and Castle, and is bossed by one magnate.
The early and high middle ages, until the calamitous 14th century, are one of a consistently growing population and a positive warm, climate. The Weald still lags well behind other regions, but gradually more permanent settlements join the temporary seasonal pasture communities, and permanent estates have to do their best to make the land productive to sustain them. The best method at the time was something called ‘convertible husbandry’. The soil was too poor quality to sustain intensive arable farming, and so in the Weald there was no real distinction between pasture and arable land. The land is enclosed and parcelled up, and fields go through a process over a cycle of years of cropping, pasture and being left fallow. More woods are also cleared, so there’s more land under production, but yields remain way below the more fertile regions.
What does excel in the Weald though is the first love of the medieval aristocrat – La chasse, hunting. The weald is beautiful but not very productive countryside, and so was perfect hunting. Chases, forests and deer parks spring up like mushrooms. Chases were thickly wooded and well hedged countryside over which the lord had a right to hunt; deer parks had to be enclosed with high pales, and there may have been 380 of them in the south east at the height, in both weald and lowland, an enormous number. And then there were forests, mainly in the Weald on the highest most infertile land, governed by strict forest laws; covering land to the equivalent of 250 deer parks. All of this was great fun – but did not encourage productive farming in the Weald. The amount of land under parks of course falls away dramatically after the 15th century, but you can still get a feel for what they looked like at places like Knole House, which is surrounded by classic deer park landscape. They might not be that productive, but they are gorgeous.
In the Downs sheep was king; and around their management a series of small hamlets developed, maybe 4 to a parish, each with their own complex of pastures, and linked into one sort of head village in the parish.
The fertile coastal areas meanwhile were far more productive, with arable being king, using a system of sheep-corn agriculture. Crops would be grown of varying types – oats, barley wheat – and then periodically sheep would be let on, to help recover their fertility. And rather than leaving land fallow, you’d plant them with legumes. It meant some areas of Kent and Sussex became the most productive in the country, and you can see that in land values – rock bottom in the Weald and Downs, sky high in the loamy north and east Kent and west Sussex. In those regions there was some of the classic medieval open field farming – land farmed in strips by villeins and serfs, open countryside. But it’s relatively rare; most of our area retains the characteristics of ancient countryside, lots of enclosed fields and hedges.
It might be that the partible inheritance of Gravelkind in Kent encouraged that, and I am going to speculate that the dispersed nature of farming had an impact on the local character. Because as you’ll hear, the locals do turn out to be consistently arsey, or to put it in another way, not very accepting of authority. It’s sometimes theorised that in contrast with those kind of individual farmsteads, open field farming encouraged a sense of community, collective working, and hierarchy. Because you were gathered together in nucleated villages, had to share resources like ploughs, plan the crops for the year as a village, you were all in one place under the eye of lord and priest, local festivals were common. It’s just a theory but you know…Invicta, and ‘Won’t be druv’ as slogans suggest something.
The coastal regions had another enormous source of wealth – the ports, trade, fishing, so it is time to talk about the Cinque Ports.
Their origin is of course because they are good harbours, a great place for merchants to develop coastal and continental trade, and fisherman to run boats. The role of fishing sometimes gets forgotten; but a lot of the Portsmen who had a hand in running the towns were fishermen, particularly the pursuit of herring up and down the coast round to East Anglia.
But there are other reasons for their growth, which lay in where they were – on the hotspot of the south east coast. That not only meant a great place to develop continental trade with the low countries in particular and France. It also meant immigration – Edward III in particular encouraged Flemings to come to the ports and to Kent more generally to teach us how to weave and produce cloth, and get greater value rather than staying in the commodity business of wool.
But it also meant violence, and I hope the gentle people of Rye and the other ports, which are quiet and pretty places now will forgive me for pointing out that their success owed a lot to their ability to fight their corner pretty uncompromisingly. A big part of that story is constant and varying tales of French rivalry, which sometimes involved crossing the line between robustly defending their interests and outright piracy. As a red blooded Englishman I might describe medieval Dunkirk as a nest of pirates, I have no doubt on the other side of the channel they’d call, say the town of Hythe a nest of pirates too. And might I just point out that like charity, the best rivalries begin at home, and that including English ships too sometimes; on at least one occasion the good people of Rye found that the French had been joined by the Fowey Gallants from Cornwall.
They were also critical to continental warfare, from the struggles of the sons of the conqueror between England and Normandy, to the various bouts of war in France. Sop they were of special importance to English monarchs. So, just like the Magnates of the Rapes of Sussex, the Cinque ports had special duties; they were required to defend the coast, and provide ships for royal fleets to give the French a well-deserved and thoroughly justified kicking. They were not alone in this, ports outside the confederation did the same, but the Cinque ports were always on the frontline.
In return they were given ways to re-imburse themselves – right over the delivery of justice, relief from fines and so on, privileges might be a better word. They had corporation rights to manage themselves, and common institutions to meet and plan – the Brodhull, for example was a common assembly for representatives of all the towns. There is a Lord Warden and Admiral of the Cinque ports appointed to look over them from the king…whose powers become more and more significant. There is one still, George Zambellas. Less powerful than they used to be, to be fair.
The name cinque ports is derived from the ancient and honourable right of the English to mispronounce any foreign language…or maybe that was how the French said the word for five back then. The original 5, the Head Ports were the most powerful at the time – Hastings New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich. But the Cinque port association grew. Two ancient towns, Rye and Winchelsea in 1190 and then what they called ‘Limbs’ with different levels of rights. The association grew to 40 at its greatest extent. There are now 14 I believe.
After the inter royal strife between the Conquerors sons, the ports – and indeed all of Kent – were next in the frontline in the First Barons war of the early 13th century. You will all know that the rebellion of the Barons against the tyrannny of Bad king John led to the signing of Magna Carta just before lunch at 12.15. John then changed his mind, and decided to revenge himself on said barons with Papal support and the Barons also became naughty by inviting Louis of France to become King of the English. At which point who knows which side to cheer for? But either way it put the Cinque Kent in the centre of affairs, waiting for another French invasion; don’t expect that theme to go away for the next, oooh 700 years or so.
Well, John besieged and captured the Barons at Rochester in Kent, bringing the walls down by with a massive fire, ramped up by the fat of 40 burning pigs. Then he also famously died, and Louis invaded to half inch the throne from young Henry III nd his regent William Marshal.
Louis reckoned without the Weald. The good people of Kent and Sussex did not like the idea of a French usurper, and one William of Cassingham, more popularly known as Willikin of the Weald, gathered a force of doughty English archers and using the broken hills and valleys of the Weald and Downs, ambushed the evil Louis near Lewes. A sort of Robin Hood figure of the south East…though restricting himself to robbing from the French rather than the rich generally. Foer his efforts. Willikin was made Warden of the Weald. Louis’ ambitions were finally sunk by the sinking of his fleet off the Cinque port of Sandwich in 1217, and that was the end of that.
The high point of the Cinque ports was probably during 13th century during which trade and population was growing all over England, and the ports held an iron grip over the Channel. Their importance might be gauged by Edward I’s response to the great storms of 1288 which totally destroyed Winchelsea – and led to his refounding of New Winchelsea, with the distinctive layout of the Gascon bastide towns, where self defence was also a requirement.
And mention of Edward I allows me to seque into one of the greatest contributions of a south East towns to England’s history. Just to set the scene, it’s the afternoon of 14th May 1264, and we are with a sweaty, dusty, dishevelled bloke in his mid 50s. He’s cowering in a Windmill, while outside he hears the taunts and laughter of a crowd. This sorry looking specimen is actually the King of the Romans, would you believe, who had been hoping to become Emperor Richard I. All he hears now are cries of
Come down, come down, thou wicked miller!
We are on the Downs above the gloriously lovely town of Lewes. The man shivering in the Windmill is Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother to Henry III. The king and his son Edward have just been defeated by the rebel army of Simon de Montfort in the Second Barons war. The King is doing some cowering of his very own, but he made it to Lewes Abbey. Before long, he will meet Simon himself, which he won’t very much enjoy, and to regain his freedom and return to London, he was forced to sign the Mise of Lewes. A ballad, the Song of Lewes, celebrated De Montfort and the victory, declaring
England breathes again, hoping for liberty
In the Mise of Lewes, Henry accepted De Montfort’s great idea. His great idea that the King should consult not just with his favourites, or his great men. He should instead run the kingdom together with the whole community of the realm, the knights of the shire and representatives of the towns – including 28 Portsmen of the Cinque ports by the. And on 20h January 1265 he did so, and the first English parliament met in Westminster Hall.
Now before long. De Montfort’s head would end up in a box, along with his, um, bits, sent by Prince Edward as a lovely pressie to Maud Mortimer.
‘My Dearest Maud, hope you are well, and the calendula flowering in your garden, please find enclosed I set of testicles…’
But the institution de Monfort fought for lived on. Sussex, then, was where the English parliament was born.
The Cinque Ports were critical to Edward III during the 100 Years’ War, and took an enthusiastic part of course, at conflicts like the battle of Sluys. But the wars also brought a massive increase in warfare and raids from the French, which had a terrible impact on trade and the costs of defence and lost ships, and by the 1340s, the ports had lost their dominance of the narrow seas to the French. So much so, that 1377 was an annus horribilis. The French occupied the Isle of Wight and visited fire and sword on the coast– overwhelming several places. Rye was pretty much razed to the ground.
The glory days of the Cinque ports were over and the 14th century was one of declining importance, because the source of their prosperity was being lost – the coastline was changing, their havens were silting up. John Leland in the early 16th century recorded that Hythe ‘now be clean destroyed’, Romney
Hath been a metely good haven but the sea is now two miles from the town
That story was reflected across many of the ports. As they lost trade they faced new competitors; there was London of course, but on the South coast, Southampton began to sweep away more and more of their business.
The 14th and 15th centuries were times of great change across all Kent and Sussex just as they were all across Europe – driven by the disastrous climate cooling, and the population crash brought by the Black Death. There are signs of deserted or shrunken villages in many places – but particularly on the Downlands, where many of those small hamlets we talked about now disappear.
However the late Middle ages is the golden age of the Yeoman farmer – or it is in the coastal regions. The population crash meant the swift decline in lords working their own estates directly, with a plentiful supply of serfs and bonded labour. Instead, they leased land out to free yeoman farmers. Serfdom therefore fell away to almost nothing, and at good rents, because it was a buyer’s market – landlords had to compete to find tenants. Often these yeoman farmers then began to consolidate, buy land from struggling owners. It is also a time of great improvement in farming techniques; landlords often tied their leases to making specific improvements.
There was significant change also in the Weald. On the one hand, the loss of population ends the advance of deforestation, and many tenements were abandoned to the weeds. But on the other, the economy of the Weald becomes more sophisticated as people innovate to make ends meet. Small towns emerge from existing settlements, and start to service local communities, and their growth is driven by robustly expanding rural crafts. There’s plenty of scope for iron working, glass making, wood, and weaving; there’s access to power in the Weald, from both water mills and wood. Helped by Flemish immigrants, rural cloth making becomes strong, and acquires a national reputation in the case of the smooth broadcloth from Cranbrook, the so called Capital of the Weald, the cloth was called Cranbrook Grey.
The growth of the Wealden economy leads to one of the most distinctive features of the Weald, which you will see in plenty, even after all these centuries – and you’ll be able to wallow in them if you are lucky enough to go to the Downlands and Weald Living museum. I speak of the Wealden House.
Classically, these start as hall houses of two rooms – a hall which stretched up to the roof with a central hearth, and a partition at the end. They are based on a timber frame, and infilled with daub and wattle. Stone was not much available, because flint was only available in the Downs and coastal regions. As time goes by and the Great Rebuilding takes root from the later 16th century, brick arrives to create a fireplace, and the hall acquires a ceiling and there’s a second floor with bedrooms. Overhanging jetties appear, to create more space, and multiple divisions are possible – a parlour, and separate kitchen. They are very typical indeed of the Wealden house.
Also appearing around this time is another very distinctive local vernacular style, which is weatherboarding. If you have a lot of wood around, laying overlapping boards as cladding is a super effective way of stopping those stiff breezes whistling through the thin daub and wattle, and they survive all over the weald and the downland.
And then one more feature of the time is the moated farmsteads – Kent has 93 of these and Sussex a stonking 190, and that’s just the ones we know about, so there might have been more. Some of them, like the beautiful Ightham Mote, get built up to become Gentry houses, but they don’t necessarily start like that. There are plenty of good reasons for yeoman to put a moat round their farmstead; they are easy to create in the Weald, given the impervious clay soil, they provide a source of water and a barrier for animals. But also, if you want to let the world know about your social pretentions, having a moat does look awfully grand, just as though you were proper gentry.
Now this is all rather nice warm and positive isn’t it? Though I might point out that it’s based on the death of several million people – and because we have been talking about the winners. Because sadly, there are losers as well in the late middle ages.
One of those were the larger towns where growth is stunted. The major town remain Canterbury, with Rochester, Lewes, and Chichester some way behind. Canterbury’s story is a good example of the lack of large towns in the South East – it had once been a competitor as one of the largest in England, along with York, Norwich & Bristol. But by 1525 it had a population of no more than 4,000, with a weak crafts industry sector. The explanation for this probably lies in a theme that will become more and more pronounced– the influence of London. Increasingly, the size of London became a gravity well, sucking in trade and agricultural produce – why take your goods to Canterbury or Rochester when London is close, you can sell more and get a better price? London’s influence will skew the south East with ever increasing force from here on in.
More dramatic were the losers amongst the working classes. Landowners don’t give up their power easily, and as peasants start demanding higher pay for their increasingly scarce labour, there are oppressive laws to keep them in their servile place – starting with Edward III’s statute of Labourers, designed to keep wages low and stop peasant moving to get higher wages. The serf with a small plot of land, was replaced by the landless labourer, the cottager; in good times that was fine, but they were highly vulnerable in bad times, and subject to life cycle poverty – when you are young and vital, things are good – when old and unable to work, life could be terminally tough.
Driven by these pressures, Kent, Sussex – and the Weald therefore acquire a reputation for fighty rebelliousness. Two of the most dramatic events of the later middle ages start in Kent; and I have to tell you, this is a tradition that will last.
So in 1381, a crowd stormed the goal at Maidstone in Kent and freed all the prisoners, including a certain hedge priest, John Ball, who whipped things up with a triumph of sloganeering, the immortal lines
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
Classic. John Ball and a local man called Wat Tyler stormed into Canterbury and opened the goals there too. The trigger for this revolt might have been something local – a running serf had been imprisoned and needed liberating – or the hated poll Tax. But the answer was to tell the King what was going on, because the king was the father of the people and would come to their aid once he was made aware. So they marched on London, joining rebels from Essex, where the father of the people would lie, trick and slaughter them, and as he did so sneer
Rustics you were born, and rustics you will stay
70 years later, the origins of Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450 were more complex; soldiers returning from defeat in France spread chaos and lawlessness, after the shame of defeat in wars of the Roses, no one trusted the politicians – and there were rumours about land seizures by royal officials. The result was a led from the Weald by a man of Kent, Jack Cade, and the outcome was the same – a mass march on London followed by brutal repression.
It seems reasonable to ask why the Weald of Kent and Sussex had become, and would remain, quite so lippy, rebellious and fighty. There was a tradition of individualism based on dispersed settlement, and rural crafts – areas such Cranbrook and Tenterden play a significant part in the rebellions, and they had a strong rural craft tradition. There’s even a suggestion that this would lead to their religious radicalism – Lollardism, and radical Protestantism. Also, the Weald had become a byword for lawlessness – communications were difficult, trouble difficult to contain so it was a refuge for criminals. It was full of Underemployed peasants with a more precarious life than on the coast, rebelling against elites preventing them from exploiting their opportunities.
Which takes me, to Tudor England, and to Bloody Mary’s London in 1554. In St Pauls Churchyard that year, you see the grisly remains of dismembered bodies. As you travel around London, you will see the same at 9 different locations. And in April, you might see Thomas Wyatt being executed for the treason which had led to the grisly executions of 100 of the rebels who had followed him to restore Queen Jane to her rightful throne. The Tudors did not like rebels, and Queen Mary was no exception.
Thomas Wyatt was a protestant nobleman from Allington on the Medway in north Kent, and he represents one aspect of the response from the people of Kent and Sussex to the Reformation. Protestantism had a strong base in both counties. There had been a hint of Lollardy; there were influential communities of strongly Protestant immigrants from Flanders, and Huguenots from France. Furthermore that culture of individualism struck a chord with the Protestant message of a direct relationship with God through the Bible. So for example, at Sandhurst, parishioners welcomed Edward VI and Cranmer’s reforms – and even complained their minister wasn’t radical enough!
But there was another side, of Catholic resistance. Elizabeth Barton, the Maid of Kent had been unwise enough to claim she’d had visions that, if Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn he would lose his kingdom within a year, amidst a great plague. This was not popular with the king, even though her visions had been pronounced as genuine by none other than cardinal Wolsey. But obviously things got a little sticky and under pressure she confessed to Thomas Cromwell that she’d been a fraud. Maid of Kent was hanged at Tyburn for treason. At the other end of the social scale, Sussex in particular had powerful noble families, notably the Fitz Alans at Arundel who remained firmly Catholic. However – generally there seems to have been hardly a murmur of dissent from Sussex to Cranmer’s reformation.
Which is very much NOT the case as the response to Mary’s Counter Reformation, as Wyatt’s rebellion demonstrates, and responses probably demonstrate where the sympathies of ordinary people lay. Kent and Sussex have the largest numbers of Protestant Martyrs burned at the stake – 54 in Kent, 41 in Sussex. By and large they were ordinary men and women, Bricklayers, millers, Pewterers among other trades. At Canterbury, 4 women were tied to the stake together, singing psalms as they burned. Maidstone and Dartford figured highly in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs too, but probably the most famous are the Lewes martyrs though; 17 of them in all, and on 22nd June 1557 10 were burned in one day, the largest amount at one sitting. Or staking. They were burned on the site of the current Town hall, and you can still see the plaque there in commemoration.
But if you want a commemoration, well, best thing to do is turn up in Lewes on 5th November. That is insane – and I mean officially insane, so much so that Lewes is known as the Bonfire capital of the England. Lewes has a population of 17,000 people normally – but on November 5th, it’s 57,000, as people descend on the town, and 25 bonfire societies march through the streets. Pope burnings are reasonably rare these days in England – but alive and burning with enthusiasm in Lewes.
ondon’s grip on the South East economy increased remorselessly through Tudor times. With a population of 400,000 by 1660, demand from London began to drive everything. The demand for grain tripled for example, and the farms of North Kent became its biggest source. It encouraged Farming to acquire a new commercialism; subsistence agriculture was now on its last legs, regions and farmers specialised – grain in North Kent and west Sussex, sheep on the Downlands – and market gardening in North and East Kent. Because they innovated, and this is when Kent earns its nickname – the Garden of England. The phrase is attributed to Henry VIII – but then names of various types do tend to stick to the Big Guy – but market gardening talks off in Kent, orchards producing fruit of all kind, and notably Cherries, and farms growing vegetables. Plus – this is when Kent’s famous hops start being grown in vast quantities, in the river valleys of the low Weald in particular. In 1698, in Faversham, a brewery was founded, Shepherds Neame, which is still functioning, and therefore is England’s oldest brewer. It’s a good pint. Hops farming is much reduced now, though still around, and you will see the lovely circular Oast houses where hops were dried as you travel around, incorporated into houses as often as not.
Population grew all over the region – but nowhere more so that the Weald, which is having a bit of a golden age, because this is the heyday of the Wealden iron. New furnace technology arrived from abroad in the Ardenne which vastly increased efficiency, and glass and iron industries took off. William Camden wrote that Sussex
Is full of iron mines, all over it; for the casting of which are furnaces are up and down the country and abundance of wood is nearly spent.
Wood was indeed a big issue; both glass and iron making competed for the available wood, and hop making too, for the large poles that it demanded. The Weald was not cut down to create a navy for Henry VIII, but high woods were cut down and instead coppiced – for making charcoal to feed the iron industry. The response to the crisis, which would kill Wealden iron in the end, appeared in an act of parliament in 1615 which forbade the use of wood in Glassmaking. Instead they would use coal. During the later 18th century, iron manufacture would therefore move away from the Weald to be closer to coal in the midlands and north.
There were other signs of London too. The Great Rebuilding shows not just in vernacular architecture but in aristocratic building too – great houses like Knole, Parham, Cowdray and Petworth. Rich Londoners began to come down to build and live, and for other attractions too. So, in 1606 a hard up Lord North claims to been on his last legs – when he drunk from a special well – and miracle! He was cured! Well, before you know it Queen Henrietta Maria had visited to take the waters, and aristocrats were staying with local farmers to do the same, and the spa of Tunbridge Wells was born. All these are pointers for what follows – the South East was becoming a playground for the rich London refugees.
Now then; it’s May 1648. Charles is safely tucked away in Carisbroke Castle on the Isle of Wight, and the English Revolution is surely safe. Especially in Kent. Because as far as any county, Kent and Sussex had been firmly parliamentarian. The strength of radical Protestantism meant the ceremonial excess of Laudianism would have set chins wobbling with horror and anyway, they were right under the eye of London, the heartland of the revolution. Parliament also recognised the importance of the area; it held crucial Iron industries and it was close to the continent, from where the king would seek foreign aid against his own people. Only Hastings had publicly declared for the king, general Waller had duly brought his army to Chichester and Arundel changed hands three times, but these were exceptions – the south East belonged to parliament.
But despite all that in 1648, Kent is in flames again. There are 10,000 people gathered on Penenden Heath in North Kent, swearing to a petition demanding the end of the New Model Army and the restoration of the king to his rights. Within days a string of fortresses – Dover, Deal, Gravesend, Rochester all declared for the king. Kent had joined Essex and South Wales in rebellion against the Commonwealth. The Earl of Norwich was at Maidstone with an army of 2000 men ready to fight for the king.
Because by 1647 Kent was fed up with this Commonwealth, its taxes and its county committees. And then on 22nd December, would you believe it, to add insult to injury, the mayor of Canterbury ordered his town criers to announce the news –
Christmas is amoral and unbiblical
Yelled the Crier
Christmas is cancelled.
Declares the Crier
It’s got nothing to do with Oliver Cromwell
Boomed the crier
Well he didn’t do the last bit – but he should have done! Much good it would have done him, and three days later on 25th Canterbury was in the grips of the Plum Pudding Riots. Shops closed and when soldiers tried to enforce the proclamation, they were fought off by the mob, who viciously hung up holly and ivy. For several weeks, the town was run by the rioters until order was restored.
Through the sound of plum pudding munching, had been the cry
For God, King Charles and Kent
So maybe it wasn’t a surprise that when Charles’ agents organised the royalist muster at Penenden in May, they would find willing audiences, and the Earl of Norwich waited with his army at Maidstone with his rebel army to see what would happen next.
Well, Fairfax is what happened next, and after a days’ fighting in the streets, the Battle of Maidstone saw the rebels put to flight and the rebellion was over.
But they would not forget and their hopes would be finally realised as a shop docked at Dover on May 28th 1660. And we’ll find out why people were excited in the next episode. I hope, honourable members, you are enjoying the history of Kent and Sussex, and either way, thank you very much indeed for being members, and for listening. Until next time, then, have a great life, and the very best of luck.
