History of Sevenoaks

Sevenoaks up to1650 Jean Fox 2002 Introduction "The present state of the Town (of Sevenoaks) itself is good and it seemeth to have been (for these many years together) in no worse plight: And yet find I not in all history, any memorable thing concerning it save only that, in the time of King Henry the sixth, Jack Cade, and his mischievous many, discomforted there Sir Humfrey Stafford and his brother, two noble gentlemen, whom the king had sent to encounter them". Other than the founding of the School by William Sennocke, this is all that William Lambarde, writing a description of Kent in 1570, could find to say about Sevenoaks1. William Lambarde, born on 18th October 1536, the eldest son of John Lambarde, Alderman of London and a wealthy London draper, became an antiquary and jurist 1 Lambarde, p.470. He gives the name of the town as "Sennocke or (as some call it) Seven oke, of a number of trees as they conjecture" 1 and, in 1570, he wrote the Perambulation of Kent which gives an insight into life in Kent in the second half of the sixteenth century. The aim of this work is to describe the development of Sevenoaks, a medium-sized town in Kent, up to 1650 using the wills which have survived and other contemporary sources to highlight specific aspects of the life of people living in the neighbourhood. The basic approach is chronological but, because particular families and topics can cover a long period, it has sometimes been necessary for topics to take precedence over chronology. In general, wills have survived only for the relatively wealthy men and women of the town. Even though individual people of the "poorer sort" cannot often be identified, descriptions of the kind of lives they led and the problems they faced are given where these are available. Where details are not available for Sevenoaks itself it is often possible to extrapolate from circumstances in surrounding areas. 2 Contents chapter page 1 The Development of Sevenoaks 7 2 The Fifteenth Century 70 3 Early Wills and the Importance of the Church 107 4 The Early Sixteenth Century 130 5 The Reformation; Henry VIII and Edward VI 153 6 Return to Catholicism; Mary Tudor and the Wyatt Rebellion 188 7 Administration and the Courts of Law 204 8 Elizabethan Times 242 9 The Threat of Invasion 318 10 Elizabethan Families 346 11 Education and Literacy 408 12 The Sevenoaks Testators 448 13 Women of the Sevenoaks Neighbourhood 504 14 The Sackvilles and Knole 589 15 The Early Stuarts 644 16 Misadventure, Crime and Enterprise 703 17 Religious Practices; Catholics and Protestants 733 18 The Artisans of Sevenoaks 771 19 The Woollen and Clothing Industry 799 20 Agriculture and the Tradespeople of Sevenoaks 825 3 21 Houses and Their Contents 869 22 Tobacco and Investing Abroad 910 23 The 1640s 930 4 Appendices 1 Surviving Wills for Sevenoaks up to 1650 2 Grants of Administration for Sevenoaks 1559-1649 3 Will of Eme White, widow 4 Wills, their Writing and Contents 5 Religious Preambles 6 Wills Written by Known Scriptors 7 Kent Villages & Towns Mentioned in the Wills 8 Places in Sevenoaks Mentioned in the Wills 9 Connections Outside Kent 10 The Sub-Manors of Rumshed and Rumshott 11 The Sub-Manors of Bradbourne and Kemsing 12 Assize Records: Items Stolen 13 Population of Sevenoaks 14 The Recusants of Sevenoaks 15 The Family and Bequests of John Blome, mercer 16 Churchwardens of Sevenoaks 5 17 Petition Regarding the Water Supply 18 Glossary 19 Bibliography Section 2 Details of Sevenoaks Families and Transcripts of the Wills. 6 Chapter 1 The Development of Sevenoaks Early Times 12 About 6000BC, in the middle stone age men were settling on the relatively dry, sandy ground to the south of the area and many of the implements they used have been found in the area. The development of agriculture led to more permanent settlements. and artifacts from have survived from the bronze age (about 1900-500 BC). Next came the Celts and the development of an iron-age culture and, between 75 and 50 BC, the Belgae, vigorous warrior-settlers of mixed Gaulish and German ancestry. From this time onwards there was a flourishing trade across the Straits of Dover. A hundred years later Roman legions invaded the country and, before long, the inhabitants of Kent became absorbed into the Roman province. 7 The Jutes in West Kent 16 From the fifth century onwards, free tenants known as ceorls, the predecessors of the yeomen, were becoming established in the Holmesdale valley. Each had their farmstead surrounded its own fields and, in the autumn they drove their cattle and swine into the forest to the south. The Origins of Sevenoaks 22 There was an old droveway south from Shoreham, through Otford and then to the Otford swine pastures in Penshurst and Chiddingstone. In addition to the swineherds, this would have been used by travellers going to more distant places and those going north would have welcomed somewhere to stop after climbing up the steep enscarpment. Thus a stopping-place could have become established where Sevenoaks church was subsequently built. The Hundred of Codsheath and the Manor of Otford 25 By the eleventh century, the manor of Otford was an ecclesiastical estate dominating the area and including the sub-manor of Sevenoaks. Two hundred years later it was the richest of the Archbishop’s Kent manors with Otford still more important than Sevenoaks. 8 The Church of St. Nicholas 29 At the beginning of the thirteenth century the country suffered from the quarrels between king John, his barons and the pope, one of the results being that the pope placed the whole country under an interdict which prohibited the clergy from performing divine service. But by the end of the century the church of St. Nicholas was well established with a recently built tower and an arcade of columns. Sevenoaks Becomes a Market Town 32 The first written record of a market in Sevenoaks is dated 1287 but Sevenoaks could have received a market charter at the beginning of the thirteenth century when Henry III granted a number of charters to villages in the area. Records surviving from the fourteenth century mention shops in the centre of the town. Methods of Holding Land 41 In Norman England, land could be held of knight service or by socage tenure, both requiring the tenant to provide service to his lord, the first connected with warfare, the second with husbandry. Buying and selling of land was a complicated process with complicated conveyancing procedures. 9 Local Administration 45 Judicial and administrative business was handled by a number of different courts. Within the hundred there were the Hundred or manor Court itself, the court-baron (the civil court of the lord of the manor) and the court-leet (the king’s court) concerned with the keeping of public peace and order. By Tudor times, criminal cases were heard at the Assize court but the manor court continued to regulate local matters such as drainage and food regulation. Economic Depression & the Black Death 51 The middle of the fourteenth century saw a change for the worse in the weather, a pestilence which killed many animals and the arrival of the Black Death. Although no details have survived of the resulting effects in the Sevenoaks area, generally there was a shortage of labour of all kinds with, not unnaturally, those labourers who had survived demanding higher wages. 10 The Developing Estates of Sevenoaks 58 During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the gentry prospered with many of them being functionaries and agents of magnates. In the Sevenoaks area the archbishop’s household would have been a major employer. These men invested their money in land which paid them rent, building up considerable estates in the process. Knole was one of these estates assembled, in particular, by the Knoles (from whom it received its name), the Brutons and the Grovehursts The Farm of Bradbourne 61 Bradbourne belonged to the Earls of Pembroke for most of the thirteenth century. In the next two centuries it had a number of different owners but, in 1540, Henry VIII decided to take it in exchange for the manor of Brasted. It remained with the Crown until the beginning of Elizabeth's reign when it was bought by Ralph Bosville. 11 Early Times The land to the north of Sevenoaks rises sharply to the chalk escarpment of the North Downs which, at its crest, is over 800 feet above sea level. In the south of the parish is a lower greensand ridge, not as high generally as the North Downs but reaching about 700 feet at Riverhill in the south of the parish of Sevenoaks. Between the chalk escarpment and the lower greensand ridge is the Vale of Holmesdale which is about four miles wide; through it runs the River Darent until it turns northward through Otford and the Darent Gap in the North Downs. The name of this river goes back to Celtic or pre-Roman times and means the water where oaks are plentiful2 showing that, even at that early time, the oak was an important tree in the area. The bottom of the Holmesdale Valley is gault, a blue- to-grey clay of great value in brick-making. Below the lower greensand ridge is the wealden clay of the low-lying Medway valley between the ridge and Tonbridge. Most of the parish of Sevenoaks is on the lower greensand with the River Darent to the north-west at Riverhead and Sevenoaks Weald and the manors in the south of the parish on the clay.

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