- What Kent Is, in Three Sentences
- The Shape of It: Coast, Chalk, Weald, and Marsh
- Who Lives Here, and How Many
- Who Rules What: the Five Authorities
- Money, Prices, and What Things Cost
- Working Kent: First Rules
“Fifty-five miles across and every mile of it on the way to somewhere. I have surveyed four counties and this is the only one where a man asked what the place is for answers by naming the road through it.”
What Kent Is, in Three Sentences
“Kent is the way in and the way out, and has been since before there was a realm to be let into. Everything else anybody says about this county is a consequence of that sentence, including the parts we are least proud of.”
Kent is the realm’s gate. Every road to the southern water runs through it, the crossing is made from its coast, and the capital is seventy-one miles from Dover and fifty-six from Canterbury. What that means in practice is a packet leaving before dawn and lying at a Lyonnais quay by the evening bell, which is true perhaps two hundred days in the year and is the whole advertisement of the service. It also means that a man who crosses is out of the realm’s law for the length of the passage and does not fully re-enter it on the Near Coast. And it means that the customs officers of this port hold, between them and in no document, the realm’s only honest ordering of which southern seals may be believed.
Kent is the realm’s garden. It grows four fifths of the realm’s hops within thirty miles of Maidstone, carries the most productive acres in Britannia in a belt within a morning of the London market, and in the first fortnight of September receives many thousands of people out of the poorer wards of the capital to pick. The county is not rich. It has rich land, which is a different thing: something like nine parts in twenty of the rent roll of a large Kentish estate is paid to addresses in London, and the steward who records that figure records it annually because the family asks annually.
And Kent argues from custom, which is the third sentence and the one strangers take longest to believe. The port-reeve at Dover shuts the quays of the realm’s gate, has done it nineteen times in twenty years, holds no warrant of any kind, and has never been asked by what authority. The sea wall that keeps a quarter of the county dry is maintained by a court the landholders elected themselves, which can enter any man’s ground and distrain for its rate, and which no charter ever constituted. A wreck on a Kentish beach is divided in the first six hours by the village, and the county courts have never dared to say the custom is void. In this county the question that settles a matter is not what the paper says. It is who has been doing the thing, and for how long.
What those three make together is a county that is rich, exposed, unusually well documented and ungoverned in one specific sense: there is no single authority here and there has not been one for six hundred years. Canterbury lost the island-wide ordering of the rite in a seven-year war, but kept its see, its lands, its chapter and its right to bury. What faded afterwards was the habit of the rest of the south referring questions of form there. Five bodies share the ground now. None can compel another. The arrangement holds because all five are old enough to know what they cannot ask for.
The realm’s opinion of Kent is that it is proud, provincial, obsessed with its own precedence and superstitious, and four fifths of that is fair. The last fifth is the reverse of the truth. This is the best documented ground in the south. Parish registers on the marsh that run further back than almost anywhere in the realm. A warreners’ tally at Wye recording the manor’s purchases of lamp oil to the gallon for four centuries. A shingle-warden who has walked the same line twice a year for forty years. A sexton of the Stour parishes who keeps a list of forty-one boundary burials because somebody a hundred years ago decided that somebody should. A county that writes things down can answer in a week what a county that does not cannot answer at all, and Kent knows precisely which of its troubles travel.
For hired work, the county divides into four working countries and they hire differently. The port and the water, where a band is judged by the gangs and by the pilots, with nothing else counting. The chalk and the valley, where the manor and one small house of the Brethren are the employers that matter. The marsh and the landings, which hire by word in a room and pay in coin on the day with no record kept. And the towns, where everything is agreed in writing in front of an attorney. A band that has worked one of the four is not thereby known in the others, and the commonest mistake outside companies make here is to assume that a good season at Dover means anything at all at Wye.
The Shape of It: Coast, Chalk, Weald, and Marsh
“Four countries in fifty miles and a man may walk out of one into the next between breakfast and midday and find the soil, the building, the accent and the price of a night’s lodging all changed together.”
The county runs east from the capital to the sea, is about fifty-five miles across at its widest, and is four distinct countries inside that a traveller can see the joins between. The chalk comes in from the west as a high ridge, runs the length of it, and goes out into the sea as the cliffs at Dover, which are the most recognised piece of ground in the realm and are simply the end of the spine. The building tells a walker where he is more reliably than the landscape. Brick and tile in the north. Flint with brick dressings on the chalk. Weatherboard and tile-hanging in the Weald. Stone in the marsh churches and nowhere else, because the marsh had money once and has not had any since.
North of the chalk is the low country along the great river, and it is the busiest and least characteristic part of Kent. Market gardens, orchards, brick, paper, the roads, and more than half the county’s people. The gardens there are worked in holdings of eight or ten acres, carry two or three crops a year, are dug rather than ploughed, and are the most productive ground in the realm. Their whole existence depends on a distance: a cart that can reach a London market before it opens can grow perishable things, and a cart that cannot, cannot. The line that divides those two conditions runs across this county at about twenty-five miles.
South of the chalk is the Weald, which is wood and iron country gone quiet. Heavy clay, lanes impassable to a loaded cart from the first frost to the end of March, scattered farms, and the coppice that supplies the hop poles, of which a garden of twenty acres wants something over thirty thousand. The Weald made a substantial part of the realm’s iron for something over three centuries and then lost the trade to the northern coal belts from 4402 to 4461, which is close enough to two generations that the county says two and does not look it up. What it has now is ponds, place names, four villages that are three farms and a church apiece, with a population poorer and more scattered than anywhere else in the county.
And south of the Weald is the marsh, which is not land in the ordinary sense. It is reclaimed sea held dry by a wall, drained by a system older than most of the realm’s institutions, grazed by more sheep to the acre than any pasture in Britannia, and governed by the landholders themselves through officers they elect. It is also unhealthy: a fever comes off the standing water in late summer, takes the newly arrived hardest, recurs in survivors for years, and has emptied four parishes within recorded memory. Nobody who can live off the marsh lives on it, which is why its churches are built for six hundred and its congregations are forty.
The coast belongs to none of the four and runs along all of them. Dover on the chalk. The beach landings on shingle, which have no charters and handle more goods than the chartered ports ever see. The silted ports, which have charters and no water, New Romney standing a mile and more inland since the night the river moved. And the great shingle ness at the southern corner, which is not geography but a thing in motion: the warden who walks it has recorded the line going seaward by something over four hundred yards in one place and landward by ninety in another across forty years. Two workable harbours on the whole of it, which is the geography that made this county a gate and made it the hardest shoreline in the realm to police.
The distances are small and are worth committing to memory, because Kentish clients assume them. Dover to Canterbury fifteen miles. Canterbury to Maidstone about twenty-eight. Maidstone to the marsh edge about twenty-five. Nothing in the county is more than two days from anything else with a cart, and a rider changing horses crosses it between dawn and dark in summer. That is the reason the marshal at Wye can put thirty mounted men on any road in the eastern half within four hours, which nobody else in Kent can do, including the corporation of Maidstone.
Who Lives Here, and How Many
“The hundred holds what it holds in February. Anybody who counts Kent in September is counting a different county and I have told the commissioners so in writing.”
Kent is populous by the standards of the realm and its figure is unstable in a way no other county’s is. In winter it holds something in the order of two hundred thousand people. In September it holds many thousands more. On the marsh in a bad August it holds several thousand fewer in that quarter than it did in June. Any statement about the population of this county has to say which month it means, and the bailiff of the Canterbury hundreds, asked for a return, will tell a commissioner that he can give the number within about four hundred and that the four hundred is not carelessness but the actual count of people nobody in the county could name.
The distribution follows the work and is uneven to a degree that surprises people who have only seen the road. The northern low country is crowded, with the river towns beside the garden belt. Canterbury and the pilgrim road carry a second concentration. Dover and the coast carry a third, smaller and more volatile than either. The Weald and the marsh are nearly empty. The chalk between them is emptier still: the dry valleys and the high shoulders carry sheep, flint pits, nobody at all, and the two attempts within memory to put a holding up there were abandoned inside a generation without a stated reason.
The people are more various than the realm expects, for the obvious reason. A county at the gate receives, and has received for a thousand years. The weaver and dyer families who came into Sandwich across two centuries of trouble on the Near Coast, stayed, and whose descendants are half the older families in that town, still called the foreign ones. Dover’s permanent population out of the packet trade. The factors and agents of two dozen southern houses. The seasonal thousands out of the London wards. And the ordinary movement of a place everybody passes through, which at Dover produces something between three and five hundred people in an ordinary month who appear in no return of any kind.
What that has produced is a county which is simultaneously the realm’s most outward-facing and its most local, and the distance between the two halves is the thing visitors consistently fail to notice. A shipping clerk at Dover holds in his head a ranking of nineteen foreign harbours: which are safe, which are slow, which will hold a cargo for a month on a pretext, and which have a habit of returning a hull with fewer men aboard than she left with. He has visited none of them. Eleven miles inland, a man in a Len valley parish has never seen the sea. Both are Kentish, and neither has much to say to the other.
The county is also unusually full of freeholders, which is the political fact underneath everything else in this county. Thousands of men in Kent own the ground they work, answer to no landlord, argue from custom rather than from a lease, and cannot be moved. The number falls by something under one in a hundred a year, generally through a sequence the county has a vocabulary for: a crop fails, a man borrows against his trees, and a second thin year arrives before the first is paid. He is said to be carrying. If another debt is laid over the first he is carrying double. When the security is finally called, the ground is said to have gone up, which means it now belongs to somebody further off, and which is said without heat and with a great deal of meaning.
The poor of Kent are treated better than in most counties and it is economics rather than sentiment. A parish that drives its labourers away in the winter cannot get its fruit picked in July, so a settled family is kept through the dead months because it will be wanted in the summer, on arrangements more generous than the law requires and written down nowhere. Every hundred in the county has an understanding by which the neighbours of a man in his second bad year take on some part of his work or decline to press a debt. It is not called charity and nobody here would thank you for the word. It is understood as insurance, because local ground is worth more to everybody around it than the price anybody could get for it.
Who Rules What: the Five Authorities
“There is no one in charge of Kent. I have been asked who to write to and the honest answer is that it depends entirely what about, and that four of the five will tell you it is not their business and be telling the truth.”
Five bodies share the government of this county and none of them can compel another, which is the structural fact a company must hold on to before it holds on to anything else. The first is the Crown’s ordinary apparatus: the magistrates sitting singly in their own parlours, the quarter sessions at Maidstone where the county actually governs itself, the assize twice a year, the sheriff, and the excise. At Dover that same Crown presence includes the permanent garrison guarding the southern approaches, magazines and the guarded receiving masts used by aerial traffic; none of it makes the port-reeve a Crown subordinate. The excise is more present here than anywhere in the realm, because hops are taxed on the dried weight at the kiln and an officer therefore stands inside a private undertaking for six weeks a year watching a process he does not understand. Kent has petitioned against that nine times in a hundred and forty years and has been refused nine times on the ground that hops are easier to count dry than sold.
The second is the boroughs and the liberties. Maidstone’s corporation, which owns the market where the county’s hops, fruit and wool are priced and whose by-laws are therefore read in every parish. The old chartered ports, which hold grants of self-government made in exchange for ship service, the youngest of those grants made in 4186 and none made since, still hold an annual muster at which the service is acknowledged, and have supplied no ship since 4319. Within its own bounds a liberty is a real jurisdiction: a band pursuing anything into New Romney will be stopped at the edge of the town, courteously, and told that its client’s authority does not run there.
The third is the houses, and here the plural matters. In the eastern county that means the Pikes of Wye above all: something over ninety people in the household, eleven thousand acres, a marshal, fourteen men under arms, and the capacity to be anywhere east of Maidstone within four hours in the earl’s colours. In the western Weald and the timber country the greater name is House Ashcombe, the Green Boughs, whose ducal interest is older in rank and broader in woodland than anything the Pikes possess. The two powers are unlike enough that Kent does not usually compare them. Ashcombe speaks through foresters, woodwards, leases, timber contracts and long estate policy; Wye through presence, parish patronage, mounted men and a household everybody can physically reach. Legally Earl Osbert can do almost nothing beyond the rights of any qualified gentleman. In practice he is asked first by every parish in half the eastern county, while an Ashcombe timber order can alter prices from the Weald to Dover without the duke appearing anywhere near the quay.
The fourth is the church, in its Canterbury form. Canterbury remains a see, but its old power to order the rite for the island passed to Oxford. The chapter’s distinctive public authority is narrow: it can consecrate ground in a form the whole south accepts and can certify in writing that a burial was properly done, which settles inheritance often enough that the certificates are forged. Outside that sphere it commands nobody, has no officers beyond its own precinct, and could not enforce a decision against a determined parish. Yet it is obeyed from here to the Solent on the strength of a four-hundred-year record of refusing more often than granting. It declined in 4544, and again in 4602, to certify for a family that could have ruined it on either occasion, survived both refusals, and is the stronger for them.
And the fifth is the bodies that police the unseen, which are two and do not speak to each other. The Brethren keep one small house at Wye, the only one in the county, attend ground when a parish asks, and normally come in nine to fourteen days. An ordinary attendance sends two brothers and is charged at eleven shillings; when the matter proceeds to a bounded suppression the house works at night in fours, with two at the working and two at the inner mark, while hired hands hold the outer bound. The Brethren make no finding about any person. The Grey Nails are sworn laymen, between sixty and ninety strong, answerable to nobody, who come within a day, attend people rather than ground, charge nothing, and have never in their history been required to show their working. A vestry with four pounds in hand and a second death is therefore not choosing only between doctrines. It is choosing between the body that comes in a day for nothing and a house whose first attendance is affordable but whose full bounded work may not be, and it often chooses accordingly.
What holds the arrangement together is that all five are old, all five know exactly what they cannot ask for, and each has something the others need. The chapter has never sought jurisdiction in the city of Canterbury, the corporation has never sought entry to the precinct as of right, and both have had opportunities and declined them. It is not tidy and it is not weak. A band that arrives looking for the authority in Kent will not find one; a band that learns which of the five owns the question in front of it will be treated well by all of them.
Money, Prices, and What Things Cost
“Twenty mites to the penny, twenty pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, and twenty pounds to the sovereign. Anybody who offers you paper at Dover is offering you a claim on a bank, and a bank is a building in London.”
The realm counts in twenties and Kent counts in them as carefully as anywhere: twenty mites to the penny, twenty pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, twenty pounds to the sovereign, and the whole of it coin. What is particular to this county is the quantity of foreign money at the coast, the readiness of the landings to take it, and the flat refusal of anywhere inland to do the same. A band paid in southern coin at Dover will change it at a loss before it reaches Maidstone, and a sovereign offered in a small harbour on the Near Coast will be looked at with suspicion where a pound will not.
Paper runs the opposite way and the rule is worth learning before the first crossing rather than on a quay. A cheque is a claim on a bank, a bank is a building in Britannia, and the claim is perfectly good at Maidstone, tolerable at Canterbury, and worthless twenty-one miles away, where nobody is obliged to honour a promise made by an institution they cannot reach. The honest factors on that coast will tell a newcomer so before he embarrasses himself. The four things that do hold over there are a syndic’s seal within that syndic’s harbour, the word of a named man who is known, coin in the hand, and a person of standing left behind as security.
Ordinary prices run a little above the realm’s average and a good deal above it at Dover in season. A night’s lodging is threepence to eightpence in an ordinary house and double that at the coast when the packets are busy, which is the most reliable complaint in the county and has been made in print in every decade anybody has checked. Dover’s answer is that a house full for four months and half empty for eight has to price the four. A day’s keep for a man and a horse is about one shilling and fourpence. A cart and driver for a day is three shillings and sixpence. Nothing will be got at any price in the first fortnight of September.
Wages are the useful comparison when a company prices its own work. A farm labourer earns about nine shillings a week and finds his own food. A gang hand on the Dover quays takes something over two shillings a tide, which in a good week is sixteen shillings and in February may be three, because a tide wage pays for tides that can be worked and February has four. A skilled man, an oast-dryer or a wall man in a storm week, earns between fifteen and twenty-two. A hopping family clears between four and nine pounds across six weeks, which is the figure that explains why many thousands of poorer Londoners come.
Commissions in this county run from three pounds for a few nights of watching by two or three men to something over twenty-five for work that is dangerous, distant, or both. The Brethren at Wye pay twenty-six pounds for three nights on an outer bound with a party of nine, state a figure for a man hurt and a figure for a man killed at the hiring, and have paid both without argument on the four occasions they have arisen. A silted-port corporation will offer eleven where Maidstone would pay eighteen, will show its accounts to anybody who asks, and will find another three pounds from somewhere if the work turns out harder than it described.
What a band should price separately, because Kentish clients habitually forget it, is the road. Four days out and four back at the pace of a cart is eight days of keep before any work is done, and keep for a party of six runs to about eight shillings a day in ordinary lodging. That is something over three pounds, which is a quarter of a middling commission, and it is the figure that most often turns a fee that sounded generous into one that does not pay. The companies that quote well here quote the road as its own line and say so, and the clients have grown used to it.
Working Kent: First Rules
“I have placed bands in this county for eleven years and I tell every new one the same three things. You will be watched. You will be asked about nothing. And in about a year somebody will offer you the work you actually came for.”
Kent hires on record and on nothing else. It is not impressed by a warrant, by a patron from another county, or by what a band did in the north, and it will be perfectly courteous about all three while declining to be moved by any of them. What moves a Kentish client is that a company did a specific thing here, that identifiable people saw it, and that those people will say so. That is the same instrument the port-reeve holds and the chapter holds: an authority made of a list of occasions on which somebody was right, kept by other people.
The consequence is a slow first season and a good second one. A new company gets parish work and corporation work: watching a piece of ground for a number of nights with lights and reporting what happened, walking a list of marked stones in daylight, escorting a valuer, standing at a gate, riding to Wye to fetch a brother. It is dull, it pays modestly, and it is the process by which the sextons, the wardens, the constables and the house form an opinion. There is no way round it. The bands that have tried to buy a way round it are remembered, and the trade’s own advice is to take that year rather than the first large commission offered, because a band that takes the large one has been chosen by a patron instead of choosing.
The second thing to expect is silence about the subject a band most wants to ask about. Kent will talk all evening about the hop, the road, the tide and the price of anything. It will answer a direct question about the see, about a locked gate on the seaward side of a marsh churchyard, about three feet of ground nobody is buried within, or about a stretch of the pilgrim road after dark, with the words of the custom and nothing further, by people who are neither frightened nor hostile and who plainly consider the matter settled.
The third is that the county divides and a band must eventually choose. The houses and the Grey Nails do not speak, and they hire through the same four or five people, who know. The manor at Wye and the beach landings are in a standing quarrel about the right of wreck that has twice put a hundred people on each side of it. The corporation of Maidstone and the Pikes have not conceded precedence at the county meeting in two hundred years. Nobody will warn a company about any of this at the time of hiring, and the discovery, when it arrives in the second season, is not reversible.
Against that, the county is a good employer and the trade says so. It pays what it said, on the day, without being chased. It does not ask a band to do what it did not agree to. It defends a company that has served it honestly, including against the county itself, which two silted-port corporations have done within living memory. And it remembers, which cuts both ways and mostly cuts the right one: a band that carried a man up off the beach on a bad night will find doors open in that quarter for years, and a band that left a gate at four in the morning will find that Maidstone heard about it within the week.
The band that does best in Kent arrives, lodges somewhere central, and takes the small work for a year. Sandwich is the most comfortable base on the coast, has beds and an attorney who takes private clients, and will deal with an outside band on written terms without requiring a patron. Maidstone is where the clients, the courts and the paperwork are. Wye is where the two largest employers of companies in the county stand half a mile apart. What a band should not do is arrive with a commission in its hand expecting the commission to do the work, because it will not, and the county will be perfectly courteous about that while declining to help.