http://kentarchaeology.org.uk/research/archaeologia-cantiana/ Kent Archaeological Society is a registered charity number 223382 © 2017 Kent Archaeological Society REVIEWS The Survey of Archbishop Pecham's Kentish Manors 1283-85. Trans- lated, edited and with introduction by Kenneth Witney. 216 x 138mm. Ixxxiv + 390pp. Seal of Archbishop Pecham + 2 b/w maps and 1 fig. Kent Records Series Volume XXVIII. Kent Archaeological Society, Maidstone, 2000. (Cased, £20.00 to members, £35.00 to non-members) ISBN 0-906746-40-X. This edition is the last substantial published work of the distinguished historian of medieval Kentish society Kenneth Witney, who died in 1999. As the foreword by Joan Thirsk makes clear, Mr Witney began work on it in 1989 but was handicapped in completing it by a serious motor accident in 1994. Its appearance now owes much to the help given to the author and the General Editor of the Kent Records series by Margaret Sparks and by Dr Thirsk herself. The volume consists of a 74-page introduction, and a translation of 92 folios of Canterbury Cathedral MS E.24 which takes up 342 pages. This text is an extremely full survey of the seventeen archiepiscopal manors in Kent and the services owed by their tenants, datable by internal references to 1283-85. The manuscript itself, however, is a fifteenth-century copy of a lost original. Information collected by local inquests in the manors, guided by earlier records, not all of which survive, is inevitably variable. The Wingham entry takes up 68 pages, those of Petham and Bishopsbourne only 4 pages each, differences only partially explic- able by the sizes of the individual estates. The editors have also added a translation, made by Dr Bridgett Jones, of the Kentish portion of Lambeth Palace Library MS E.D.2068, a text described by F.R.H. Du Boulay in The Lordship of Canterbury (1966) as 'a near-contemp- orary excerption of the same survey'. This adds useful comparative material, but its real relationship to the larger text remains unclear, and is not ascertainable by direct comparison, as other intermediary records were probably also involved. Just by putting such an important source into print, this volume performs a valuable service to Kent history. The edition and trans- lation is as painstaking as it could be, with a helpful glossary, given that the meanings of some technical terms are still uncertain. The 413 REVIEWS introduction shows all the deep knowledge and feeling for local conditions characteristic of Mr Witney's work and is a real achieve- ment of sensitive reconstruction. His conclusions constitute a compel- ling vision of what medieval Kent, or parts of it, was like. The general context into which they fit, however, is more debatable. Witney's concern to emphasize that Kent was 'enterprising and vital', 'a society which profited from a happy combination of natural and historical advantages', may therefore understate the incidence of other features of this society, such as poverty, crime and conflict. And some of the elements he and others have regarded as specially characteristic of medieval Kent, such as free status, partible inherit- ance and an active peasant land market - conditions which made poss- ible an enterprising society - have now been shown to be relatively widespread in other regions too. In some ways this makes Kent more significant; an important example for the study of national trends rather than a perennial exception to them. Finally it is important to alert the reader to those things which this edition does not set out to do. There is no index of people and places, except for a list of references to the seventeen manors, which makes use of the edition for local research rather more cumbersome, though the General Editor writes that an index may be separately issued in due course 'if there is demand for it'. There is no discussion, however cursory, of the appearance and layout of the fifteenth-century manu- script, or of the context in which it was copied from the thirteenth- century original. Little is said either of the administrative system on which Archbishop Pecham relied to produce such surveys. The most recent item cited in the bibliography was published in 1992. The real strength of the introduction lies, as already indicated, in its descript- ive analysis of customs and services in their local settings, which adds much to our knowledge and provides ample basis for the hope that 'this volume will stimulate further research'. RICHARD EALES Early Modern Kent 1540-1640. Edited by Michael Zell. 16 x 24 cm. x + 340 pp. 12 illustrations, 10 tables and 3 figures. Kent History Project, Boydell Press and Kent County Council, 2000. (Cased, £50.00) ISBN 1352-805X. This very welcome addition to the historiography of Kent covers a per- iod of adaptation by the people of the county to changes in religion, political structure, agriculture and industry. The format of the Kent 414 REVIEWS History Project series, collections of essays by specialist historians, can create problems for the reader looking for a coherent picture. Hence the two excellent essays on the political framework, Chapter 1 'Governing the County' by Patricia Hyde and Michael Zell, and Chapter 9 'The Rise of Ideological politics in Kent, 1558-1640' by Jacqueline Eales are separated by essays on landholding, agriculture, industry, towns and religious change. It is somewhat frustrating to find that the list of MPs for the county appended to chapter 1 stops at 1558 and is never completed in the later sections. These chapters address the politics of Kent from both the perspective of the county and the crown and central government, and, taken together with chapter 2, 'Landholding and the Land Market' do succeed in drawing a coherent picture of the shifts in political power within the county. Both re-examine the apparent insularity of the Kentish gentry, with Dr Eales challenging Everitt's thesis on the insignificance of political or religious ideologies in Kent, and arguing that 'ideological factors were important in moulding public opinion in Kent in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period'. In Chapter 2, Zell argues convincingly the case for the strength of Kentish landowners, from noble to yeoman peasant farmers, and for the retention of lands within Kentish born families both before and after the Dissolution. The essay is a tour deforce on the nature of land- holding and transactions, but barely goes beyond the mid- to later sixteenth century. This is not the case in Joan Thirsk's contribution, 'Agriculture in Kent, 1540-1640' which brings together an exceptional array of knowledge of the geology, soils, cultivation and economy of the county. It would have been helpful if the distinctions between the agricultural regions could have been made clearer on the otherwise useful map (facing p. 77). The introduction to the third section, on the Weald, paints an evocative picture of the region, making sense of its geological structure and the changes wrought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to anyone familiar with the area; a stranger might welcome a map locating the different sub-regions. The nature of a visual comprehension of Kent and its agriculture is pleasingly conveyed throughout this chapter, but perhaps the greatest value of Dr Thirsk's contribution is her acute perception of the detail of practice beyond the common generalisation of agricultural trends in the early modern period. For example 'A picture of north Kent focus- ing on cattle and sheep and on arable crops in the normal rotation ... misses the remarkable diversity of this region. Distinctive special- ities are glimpsed at every turn' is evidenced by references to 'poultry in Sheppey', 'beekeeping, hopgrowing and grafted fruit trees'. 415 REVIEWS By contrast Jane Andrewes' discussion of industries in the same period is a more solid survey, largely compiled from earlier second- ary sources, of the development of an industrial base in Kent under- pinned by European-wide commercial developments and Govern- ment policy. The maps in this section are however very useful with the textiles mapped separately, and there is a good, clear description of the process of cloth manufacture in the Weald (pp.112-114). In chapter 5 Jacqueline Bower examines the nature of the early modern Kentish town, highlighting the large number of relatively small towns with markets; Kent's largest urban centre, Canterbury, with a population of c. 5,000 in 1600 ranked only thirteenth in size in England. Her detailed research into the available population evidence is used in effective tables to demonstrate contrasting trends across the county, whether influenced by plague, migration, municipal policy or economic trends. For example, the excess of baptisms over burials in Maidstone in the early seventeenth century is followed by the dram- atic excess of burials over baptisms in Milton-next-Gravesend for the same period (pp.156-57). The second half of the book deals with the religious upheaval of the Reformation and its impact, and Zell revisits the debate on the motiv- ation of the English Reformation siding with those arguing that the Reformation in Kent was already in progress 'before the English Church broke its institutional ties with the "universal" Catholic church...'. He then goes on to explain 'how [the] transformation took place in Kent', and it is helpful that these two central essays, 'The coming of religious reform' and 'The establishment of a Protestant Church' have been written by the same author. While the majority of this valuable compilation deals with the large themes of political, religious, and social and economic history, Malcolm Gaskill's compelling chapter, 'Witches and Witchcraft Prosecutions, 1560-1660', uses the detailed evidence of witchcraft prosecutions in Kent to examine the phenomenon which emerged in the early modern period, as well as clarifying the role and decline of the ecclesiastical justice system.