- The County Town, and What It Actually Runs
- The Guildhall, the Corporation, and the Mayor
- The Market Fall, and What the County Learned From It
- The Courts, the Assize, and Where a Company Ends Up
- The Gaol, the Rope, and What the County Does With Its Worst
- What Maidstone Can Actually Put on a Street
“This town lost a year out of its own books once and has never got over it. We survey, we post, we chalk the price on the gate, and we keep three walled grounds locked inside the walls and enter the cost as repairs.”
The County Town, and What It Actually Runs
“Maidstone governs Kent in the sense that Kent comes to Maidstone to argue. That is not nothing. It is also not what the word governs usually means, and I have stopped correcting people who assume the larger sense.”
Maidstone sits at the centre of the county on the river, which is why it is the county town and is the whole explanation. Everything that must be done for Kent as a whole is done here because here is where the roads and the water meet: the assize, the quarter sessions, the gaol, the county meeting, the great market, and the offices of the trades that deal with the whole county rather than a corner of it. It is not the largest town in Kent by much and it is not the richest, and neither fact has ever been relevant.
What the corporation actually controls is the town, which is smaller than the county and larger than a stranger expects. Markets and their tolls, the bridges, the paving, the watch, the quay and the river navigation, the two charities, the grammar school, and a body of by-laws about trade within the borough that the county trades pay a great deal of attention to. Where the corporation has real leverage over Kent is the market, because the county’s hops, fruit and wool are priced here, and a rule about how they may be sold is a rule about what they are worth.
What the corporation does not control is the county, and the distinction matters because visitors constantly confuse the two. The magistrates are not the corporation. The assize is not the corporation. The militia is not the corporation. Four separate authorities sit in this town in four separate buildings and the corporation is the one with the best building and the least reach, which is a fair description of most county towns in the realm and is resented here more than most because Maidstone knows it.
The town itself is a market town that has grown, with the trades that follow: brewing on a considerable scale, paper on the river, the fruit and hop factors, the lawyers, and the coaching business that comes of sitting where four roads cross. It is prosperous, is proud, is smaller than London people expect, and contains more attorneys per thousand souls than any place in the south, which the county mentions often.
For a company Maidstone is where the paperwork is and where the clients are. Nearly every commission in Kent that is not agreed on a quay at Dover is agreed in this town, because this is where the owners, the factors, the attorneys and the magistrates all are in the same week. A band working the county without a standing arrangement in Maidstone is working at a disadvantage, and the arrangement is usually an attorney.
What the corporation does about its own ground is less than it tells visitors and it is candid enough in the minutes. The town has three closed burial grounds inside the walls, the oldest attached to a house dissolved before the war, and the corporation maintains the walls of all three, keeps the gates locked, and has refused four applications to build on any of them within living memory. It has never applied to have any of them attended. The reason given in the minutes is expense. The reason given by the town clerk to anybody who asks in the building is that an application would have to state a cause, and the corporation would then have to decide what cause to state.
What cause the corporation would have to state is the question the town clerk is inviting, and the answer is short enough to see why nobody wants it minuted. An application to have ground attended goes to the chapter, the chapter requires the applicant to say what the ground is doing that requires attending, and the corporation would then have on its own record, in its own hand, a statement about three pieces of walled land inside its walls. Everything else follows from that. The rates would have to be told. The neighbours would have to be told. The three grounds, which at present are simply closed, would become three grounds the borough had said something about. So the corporation maintains the walls, keeps the gates locked, refuses the building applications, records the expense under repairs, which is what it has done for a hundred and forty years and what it will go on doing.
The Guildhall, the Corporation, and the Mayor
“The mayoralty is a year long, costs the holder more than it pays, and is fought over as though it were a bishopric. I was warned of this. I did not believe it until my second week.”
The corporation of Maidstone is old, is self-selecting within limits, and works about as well as such bodies do. A mayor, chosen annually from among the aldermen. A body of aldermen who hold for life. A common council elected on a franchise that has been argued about for a century. Town clerk, chamberlain, serjeants, and the usual apparatus. It meets in the guildhall, keeps excellent records, and is neither the nest of corruption its critics describe nor the model of civic virtue it describes itself as.
Mayor Robert Aylesford is in his second term, which is unusual in an office chosen annually, and holds a position in the county that is larger than the office. He spent twenty years in the fruit and hop trade before the aldermen chose him, knows the market and the river navigation better than most of the corporation, and has the Kentish advantage of being able to state exactly which earlier decision he is relying on. His standing rests on the same thing as every other real authority in this county: a public record of having been right about specific things.
Aylesford’s difficulty is the corporation’s difficulty and it is structural. The mayor may do nothing the council will not vote, the council divides on lines that have nothing to do with the business in front of it, and any decision that costs money must survive a body of men most of whom will be aldermen long after this mayor is out. He has got four substantial things through in three years, which is considered remarkable, and each one took a year of preparation before it was ever put.
Eleanor Marsh is still quoted throughout this chapter because her papers on old waters, inner basins and southern administration are read in Maidstone as readily as in Dover. In 4621 she is Lady Mayor of London, not an officer of this corporation. Kent cites her because she knows the subject, which is exactly the distinction the county expects strangers to make between a person’s office and a person’s standing.
Maidstone’s own society is built around the market rather than the court. Fruit and hop factors, brewers, paper men, attorneys, physicians, substantial shopkeepers, coaching proprietors and the smaller landed families meet often enough that the distinction between business and social life is mostly a question of the room. The same people who argue a price at noon dine together at eight, sit on a charity committee the next week and consider a marriage between their children the year after. A visitor looking for a separate commercial class and gentry class will find both and then spend the season watching them intermarry.
The town’s good houses are not London great houses and do not pretend to be. They keep a drawing room, a dining room, two servants if the household is doing well, a piano or harmonium if somebody plays, decent silver and a strong opinion about who should be asked in through the front. Invitations carry more information than the corporation minutes. A factor received regularly by an old county family has risen whether his bank balance has changed or not. A gentleman who begins dining only with attorneys has generally lost something. The women who manage these households are among the town’s most effective brokers of standing precisely because no formal office records the introduction they have made.
Marriage is correspondingly practical and intensely observed. Planter money seeks town security; professional money seeks land or connection; smaller gentry families seek capital without advertising the need. A daughter who can keep accounts is an asset nobody names in the marriage articles and everybody asks about beforehand. A younger son who knows the river trade is more useful to a fruit family than a prettier pedigree with no occupation. The town talks about affection and settlement in the same conversation and sees no contradiction.
Leisure follows the same scale. The Medway has rowing and sculling in the summer, the inns keep bowls and cards, shooting matches attach themselves to fairs, and the roads outside town carry horse trials when the ground is right. Wagers are common on fruit prices, weather, races and anything else that can be made to finish before supper. Aylesford is visible at enough of these occasions that his mayoralty has acquired a personal following the office usually does not possess. He is cheered most loudly by men who then vote against his paving rate, which he regards as a sound constitutional arrangement.
Fashion reaches Maidstone from two directions and is edited on arrival. London supplies the formal cut, hats, printed taste and the conviction that whatever is current must be known. Dover supplies Near-Coast colour, small jewellery, foreign fastenings and the occasional Gloam severity. Maidstone removes whatever would interfere with a market day and keeps the rest. A good coat here is expected to survive a cart yard. The town is prosperous enough to notice fashion and provincial enough to insist that practicality was its own idea.
The standing quarrels of the corporation are worth a company’s knowledge because a band will be hired into them. The market tolls, disputed by the county traders. The river navigation, disputed with the mill owners. The franchise, disputed by everybody. And the oldest one, the corporation against the Pikes of Wye over precedence at the county meeting, which is about nothing whatever and has been fought with complete seriousness since the county meeting of 4187.
The guildhall keeps the borough records and they are open on application, which is worth knowing before anything else about the town. Charters, by-laws, the market books, the accounts, the freemen’s rolls, and the minutes of every council meeting for four hundred years. A company that needs to establish who has been doing a thing and for how long, which as noted is the question that settles matters in Kent, will find the answer in this building more often than anywhere else in the county.
One series in that building is worth naming on its own because no band has ever used it and it answers the Kentish question directly. The borough keeps the freemen admissions, which give a name, a trade, a date and the person who vouched, running unbroken for four hundred years. Set beside the market books, which give who traded and in what, the two together will establish who has been doing a thing in this town, for how long, and on whose word, in an afternoon. The town clerk will produce both for anybody who asks and has produced them perhaps a dozen times in his service, mostly for genealogists. He remarks, to anybody who shows an interest, that the admissions also record the refusals, that the refusals carry no reason, and that they cluster in a way he has never had the leisure to look into.
The Market Fall, and What the County Learned From It
“Nobody agrees what year it was. Everybody agrees what it cost, which tells you something about how this county keeps its accounts.”
At some point in the county’s history the market at Maidstone fell, and the event is remembered across Kent under that name without anybody being able to date it. The registers that would fix it are the borough’s, and the borough’s books have a gap at exactly the place where the year should be, which is the sort of coincidence the county has stopped finding remarkable and which is the reason every account of it begins with an apology.
What is agreed is the shape. The market building, or a substantial part of it, came down on a market day with the town at its fullest. The dead were counted in the dozens and not the units. The building was old, was known to be old, had been reported on, and the report had been received by the corporation of the day and not acted on. Nothing about any of this requires an explanation beyond the ordinary ones, and the county has never been fully satisfied with the ordinary ones.
The reason for the dissatisfaction is the gap. A borough that keeps four hundred years of minutes has lost the minutes for the relevant period, and has lost them in a manner nobody has ever accounted for. The most likely explanation is the dull one: a corporation that had been warned and had done nothing removed the evidence that it had been warned. Maidstone has believed that for a long time, has never been able to prove it, and has built a considerable amount of its civic character on the belief.
What the county took from it is visible everywhere and is the useful part. Kent inspects. Every market building in the county is surveyed on a cycle written into borough by-laws, the surveys are posted publicly, and a surveyor who passes a structure that afterwards fails is named in the posting. The practice spread from Maidstone to the whole county within two generations and is more rigorous here than in London, which Kentish people mention.
It is also the origin of the county’s most characteristic habit, which a company will run into in every hundred. Kent writes things down and posts them. The market surveys, the wall rates, the tide boards at the landings, the hoppers’ prices chalked at the garden gate, the count at the shrine in Canterbury. A county that has once lost a year out of its own books has become, permanently and slightly obsessively, a county that puts the figures where anybody can see them.
The Courts, the Assize, and Where a Company Ends Up
“Two gaol deliveries a year and a calendar of between fifty and ninety. The whole county’s business of consequence passes this bar in eleven days, and then the judge goes home and Kent settles what is left among itself for five months.”
The county’s justice comes in three layers and a company should know which one it is in. At the bottom, the single magistrate, sitting in his own parlour, who disposes of an enormous volume of small business and is the authority most bands actually encounter. In the middle, the quarter sessions at Maidstone, the bench together, which handles the county’s ordinary crime and a great deal of administration besides. At the top, the assize, twice a year, which handles what can hang.
The assize is an event rather than an institution. A judge arrives from Westminster, the county turns out, the calendar is read, and eleven days later everything on it has been disposed of. Because the judge is a stranger and is here briefly, what actually decides most assize business is the preparation done by people who are not strangers: the clerk, the county attorneys, the magistrates who committed the cases. A band that finds itself on an assize calendar is in the hands of those people and should know their names before it needs them.
The quarter sessions is where the county governs itself and is more important to a company than the assize. The bench sets the county rate, orders the bridges, licenses, oversees the gaol, appoints and dismisses, and hears the appeals that decide settlement. It also keeps the only complete record in Kent of who has been bound over, licensed, complained of or recommended, and a band’s standing in this county is in practice whatever the sessions book says it is.
What a company is most often in court for is not crime. It is the recovery of a fee. Kentish clients dispute bills at a rate the trade finds notable, the disputes turn on what was actually agreed, and the county courts take a consistent view which every band working here should have written on the inside of its articles: an agreement not in writing is worth what the two parties now say it was, and the client is the one with the attorney on a retainer.
The second thing that brings a band before a bench is the aftermath of a working. Ground is opened, a party is hired to hold an outer bound, somebody is hurt or something is damaged, and the question of who authorised what arrives in front of a magistrate six weeks later. The houses give the same advice in every county and it holds double here. Get the request in writing from the parish, and keep it, because the parish that asked will remember the asking differently.
What the parish will remember differently is specific enough to be guarded against, and the houses that work Kent guard against it in the same three ways. The parish will remember that it asked for advice rather than for a working. It will remember that no ground was to be opened. And it will remember that the request came from an individual rather than from the vestry, which is frequently true and is always fatal. The remedy is a note, written at the time, naming who asked, what was asked for, and what was said about the ground, signed by the person who asked or else witnessed by somebody who is not in the band. It takes four minutes. Of the nine actions brought against companies in this county in the last twenty years, seven turned on precisely this, and in six of the seven the band had no note.
The Gaol, the Rope, and What the County Does With Its Worst
“Ninety-one in the house and room for sixty. Of the ninety-one, eleven are waiting on the assize, four are for the rope if it goes against them, and the rest are debt, drink and the season. I keep the book. I am not asked for my opinion of the arithmetic.”
The county gaol at Maidstone holds the whole of Kent’s serious custody and is, like every county gaol in the realm, over its intended number. The population divides much as it does everywhere: debtors, who are the largest single class and who may be visited and may work; those awaiting trial; those under sentence short of the rope; and a small number under sentence of death waiting on the assize or on a reprieve. The debtors’ side and the felons’ side are separate worlds with separate economies and separate rules.
The rope in Kent is used less often than in the neighbouring counties and the county is quietly proud of the figure, but the reason is commonly misunderstood. Kent is not in the habit of reprieving capital convictions as though the sentence were optional. Its magistrates and juries avoid creating a capital conviction where the law honestly allows a lesser one: a doubtful value is found low, a doubtful intent is not improved by rhetoric, and a theft that can properly be charged as something short of the rope usually is. Once a jury has convicted on one of the grave hanging offences, mercy is possible but exceptional and belongs above the county rather than to it.
The grave hanging offences are therefore worth naming plainly because they are where a company’s evidence can end. Murder and treason. Deliberate arson, with fire-raising in the hop season treated with particular severity. Highway robbery. Horse theft and cattle theft, both understood as attacks on transport, husbandry and livelihood rather than as ordinary property theft. And witchcraft in the legal sense: proved dealing, compact or commerce with demons or spirits. Conviction for any of these ordinarily ends at the gallows. A rare reprieve is remembered because it is rare.
The unseen is where the Grey Nails and the courts meet, and it does not meet cleanly. Kentish law does not make every charm, foolish rite, grave trespass or piece of folk practice into witchcraft. Charm fraud, unlawful digging and interference with consecrated ground may be punished severely, but the hanging offence is narrower: actual dealing with demons or spirits, or conduct the assize can prove amounted to such dealing. The Grey Nails use the word more broadly than the courts do. Cases brought by the order are worse prepared than most others on the calendar, rest more often on a single neighbour’s word, and are convicted at a rate that troubles the clerk of assize enough that he has written it down. Nobody in the county has yet made an issue of it, because the parishes which call the order want the convictions.
For a band the practical consequence is a rule worth keeping. A company that assists the Grey Nails at a taking will be a witness at the trial, will be the only witness present who is not a member of the order, and will be asked in open court what it actually saw. Bands that have been through that once are careful afterwards about which calls they answer, and the houses that know Kent will not take the order’s work at all.
What the band is actually asked in open court is narrower than a company expects and is harder to answer than it sounds. Not what the order did, which the order will say. What the band saw, in order, with times. A working has no times: it has a night, a sequence of positions, and a point at which somebody outside the bound was told it was finished. A company that has not kept a watch book will be taken through that in front of a jury by a man whose whole purpose is to show that the party holding the bound could not see the ground. Three of the houses that work this county now require a written watch for any commission with the order in it, kept by a named person, with the hour entered at every change. The requirement came out of one trial and every house adopted it within a year.
What a person given up by the order is actually charged with is the question every outside band asks and the answer is that it is never the possession. No indictment in this realm uses the word. What comes before the bench is what the person is said to have done, which is why the three defended cases turned on evidence of acts and not on evidence of anything else, and why the order has never had to prove its finding in a court. The finding is not in issue. A county attorney will explain this patiently to anybody, will agree that it is unsatisfactory, and will point out that the alternative is a court asked to rule on whether a person is possessed, which no bench in Britannia has ever consented to attempt. Kent has looked at that alternative twice and has both times preferred the arrangement it has.
What Maidstone Can Actually Put on a Street
“Two constables to a ward, a serjeant, and the militia if the county will call it out, which takes a magistrate, a written requisition and about eleven hours. I am asked every year to explain why the town cannot simply deal with a disturbance, and that is the explanation.”
The county town has four authorities in it and almost no force belonging to any of them, which is the fact that governs what actually happens when something goes wrong in Maidstone. The corporation has a watch and two constables to a ward, elderly by design and unarmed by custom. The magistrates have the constables of the hundreds, who are farmers doing a year’s duty. The gaol has its own staff, who do not leave it.
The militia is the only body with numbers and it is not available. Calling it out requires a magistrate’s requisition in writing, takes the better part of a day, and is regarded by everybody involved as a serious step to be avoided. It has been called out in this county four times in sixty years, of which three were the hopping season and one was a disputed enclosure that the Pikes had already ended before the militia arrived.
What Maidstone does instead is what the county does everywhere, which is to rely on standing and on speed. A disturbance is ended by somebody the crowd knows arriving early. The corporation’s serjeants are chosen for that quality rather than for size. The mayor has gone into two himself. And on eleven occasions in six years the thing that ended a difficulty in the eastern half of the county was fourteen men in the earl’s colours on a road.
The gap is real and everybody in the town can describe it. Anything requiring more than a dozen people, in less than a day, cannot be done by any authority in Kent. The hopping season quadruples four hundreds and adds no officers. And the corporation has raised the question at the quarter sessions three times in a decade and been told each time that the county rate will not carry it.
Into that gap the hired companies have moved, which is the honest account of why this trade has work in Kent at all. Bands are taken on by corporations, by planters, by parishes and by the bench itself, to do things that ought to be done by an officer and cannot be. Miles Boxley is entirely candid about it and says the arrangement is unsatisfactory, is cheaper than the alternative, and has not once failed the town.
A band should understand what it is therefore standing in for, because it changes how it will be judged. A company hired into a Kentish disturbance is not a private party protecting a client. It is, in the eyes of everybody present, the thing that has arrived instead of the constable, and it will be held to a constable’s standard of behaviour by people who will remember for twenty years.