Introduction

If it be asked what is the scope and object of our design, we shall best answer in the words of the philosopher which we have chosen for the motto of our work. From the memory of things decayed and forgotten, we propose to save and recover what we may, for the present generation and for posterity, of the wrecks still floating on the ocean of time, and preserve them with a religious and scrupulous diligence. We propose to gather into one the neglected fragments and faint memorials that remain to us of ages long gone by; to reclaim and preserve the memories of men who, with common passions like ourselves, have stood and laboured on this soil of Kent; to save from the submergence of oblivion their manners and their traditions, their names, their lineage, their language, and their deeds. To reproduce the past in its full integrity is perhaps impossible; yet for those who have hopes somewhat beyond the present, vision and affections somewhat more extended than the narrow shoal of earth and time on which they stand, it may be sufficient, if we can collect some feeble and scanty remnants, which, failing to ensure a higher purpose, may help them in some degree to link the present to the past and serve as stepping-stones to bridge over the broad chasm and torrent of time.

Upon the importance of such a work as this it is hardly needful for us to enlarge. To the archaeological researches of scholars during the last and the preceding centuries, history and criticism are more indebted than to any other studies. From the labours of the archaeologist, from coins, monuments, inscriptions, and etymologies, the modern historian of Rome has been enabled to throw a steadier light, not merely on the obscure originals of that imperial city, a clearer and brighter light than the Roman himself ever enjoyed, but to hold up a torch to all history, and teach mankind to thread those paths with safety which they had trodden blindfold before. Why should not similar fruits be expected from similar labours? Why should not the toil of the archaeologist, when applied to our own county, prove as beneficial to English history? Why should not the light thus upheld on the distant past, kindle into a steadier blaze for the history of nearer times? In all that constitutes such memorials as these, in the bulk and salvage of these wrecks, England is incomparably richer than Greece or Rome. Here civil wars and foreign invasions have less obliterated the traces of ancient laws, institutions, families, and races; the barrows and burial-grounds of long-forgotten generations remain unviolated; the manor-house and the farm bear upon their faces the legible records of the past as clearly as the promises of the future; the very shells and incrustations through which the internal life of the nation has passed have been religiously preserved in all its varied forms. We can trace, from step to step, from age to age, the infant sallies, the march and progress, the maturer counsels and ripened institutions of the land. We can point to the mine from which they were dug, the shadows where they reposed at noon.

To collect, register, and preserve these memorials of the past, is the duty of every man; it is especially incumbent upon the men of Kent. The history of Kent is, in a measure, the history of our common country. No great movement, civil or religious, has cast its light or shadow on the land, of which Kent has not preserved the unfading impress and memorial. No races have here taken root, or disappeared from the soil; no peculiarity of laws, of customs, or of language; no war or invasion threatened, the mementoes of which cannot be traced with greater certainty in the history of Kent than elsewhere. Here first landed the Roman, here the Saxon, here the first Christian monk and missionary. Here labour and letters first went hand in hand. Here rose the first Abbey, the first Cathedral. Starting from the great port of Kent the Norman turned the key on the Conquest of England. From Dover crusading kings, conquerors of France, insular opponents of continental despotism, started forth on their several missions of religion, of war, and of liberty. Here landed the French monarch in his abasement; here Charles V. sunned his imperial crown. What ceremonies, what pomps, what processions have not lined the streets of our Kentish capital or threaded their way along its familiar roads! Pilgrims to the shrine of St. Thomas, "with rich offerings;" the wealthy franklin, with his well-filled purse; ministers to all Courts; ambassadors from all climes - the Frank and the Almayn, the Italian and the Spaniard, the Muscovite and the Dane; archbishops and cardinals; kings and emperors; whatever of ambition, of gain, or pleasure, can enter the heart or prompt the actions and motives of man; here all passed and repassed; here found shelter in the abbeys or palaces, the hostelries or manor-houses of Kent. No busier mart in all England: none more rich or more diversified, could imagination recall and reinvest the scene. From bluff headland to shelving down, from salt flood to ebbing stream, from hop-gardens, cherry-orchards, meads, and cornfields, homestead or manor-house, ancestral hall or feudal castle, to Roman keep or Celtic barrow, Saxon burg or Norman cathedral, what wants our Kent of instruction, meditation, and delight? Here are the usages and customs embalmed, here the thoughts and feelings of every generation, that has stood and rested on English soil. In its dust are the ashes of Celt, Belgian, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman. Here the Roman landed, never to return; here he surrounded himself with the arts of civilized life. Here the Saxon still wandered in the forest, without disloyalty to his ancient creed; and the Dane in its bright bays and creeks still gazed on that element which reminded him of his Norse forefathers, and filled the sea with visions not less ennobling than the Saxon found by land.

From the date when this island first appears in the page of history, has for the first time a history of its own, Kent is the bond that binds it to the old world; Kent is the first link of that electric chain that rouses it from the slumbers of untold and unheeded generations; Kent first brings it within the tide and flow of civilized life. Here were first heard the words which have formed the pith and staple of our English tongue; here first were cradled the laws, customs, manners, institutions, which have entered so deeply into the formation of our national life and character. Here were the first indications given, followed by many since, that that life had really commenced, had taken vigorous root, could not be removed by extraneous force, however it might be modified. In this the most accessible corner of the island, most exposed to external influences, the sally-port and highway of the nations, opening its bosom, like its sea, to all comers, sprang forth that unbated spirit of independence and love of liberty which have rendered Kent famous in the annals of England; true to that image of our common country, which has received all races, admitted all literatures, sheltered all tribes, given equal rights to all strangers, and yet has maintained inviolate its self-respect, its irrepressible love of freedom, its distinctive individuality of character.

Vividly has it impressed itself on the imagination of our poets, on his more than all, who is the faithfulest and truest exponent of English nationality. In the dramas of Shakspeare the features of Kent stand clearly forth in indelible portraiture, more distinctly graven than those of his native Warwickshire. The particular has passed into the general; in the mind of the native, as well as of the stranger, the local portraiture of Kent has become the portraiture of England. The dimmest tradition of its Celtic times, the grandest and most pathetic of our island histories, is associated with Kent in the conception of the poet. From our county it has derived a definite shape, "a local habitation." By virtue of that impression, stamped on his own imagination and that of all Englishmen, the poet has been enabled to unite the shadowy and unseen past to local and visible scenery; he has transferred us, with all our sympathies, to ages long before the Roman had set his eyes upon this land, making us feel, in King Lear, our human affinity with the remotest occupiers of the soil. To unravel the various threads of which these impressions are composed, to penetrate the channel to its primeval source, to give clearness and consistency to the outline now vague, shadowy, and incomplete, to find a certain footing for the historian amidst fading and feeble traditions, to bind age to age by feelings of natural piety, but especially to ages far removed, is the task of the archaeologist; a task, as Bacon says, grateful to man and not without reverence. We desire to see, as who would not? this county of ours reinvested with its "forest primeval," its first inhabitants, its earliest colonists; we desire to see the successive steps which have advanced us from a small to a mighty nation, to revisit the cradle of our history, to realize it as far as may be from generation to generation. The dress and manners, the houses they lived in, the food they ate, much more the language and the thoughts, the polity and institutions, of those who have preceded us, are full of thoughtful pleasure and delight. And for these purposes the archaeology of Kent furnishes a rich and unexplored field. If Celtic history is to be studied, we have Celtic remains, the cromlechs of Coldrum, of Kitt's Cotty, of Addington, and others. These have yet to be explored, developed, and described. If Roman military occupation, we have Roman fortresses, Richborough, Reculver, Lymne, and Dover; Roman roads, stations, baths, and monuments, are sown broadcast over the land. Step by step may the inquirer trace, in the examination of these remains, now spanning the long reclaimed morass, now surmounting the hill or piercing the once impenetrable forest, the genius of that unwearied people, covering with a sympathetic network the provinces under their control; bringing under military rule and into stern military contact, mountain and seaport, forest, fortress, and rising colony; ruling all and rousing all with the magical rapidity and precision of their movements.

When the fierce native found shelter no longer in his thickets, from that stern gaze which had scanned and measured every corner of the earth, when "force perforce" he must endure the presence of his conqueror; when the desolated precincts afforded no protection or reverence to his Druids, when the conqueror himself exchanged the sword for arts and civilization; in the remains of military roads and strongholds, of baths, of temples, and granaries, the archaeologist of Kent will trace the change, and picture to himself the next great step in the annals of his country. He will read in the monuments of Celtic-Roman Kent the efficacy of those lessons which the polished and politic Roman delivered to his conquered subjects; he will see Kentish Britain pouring its tributes of coin into the ports and navies of the Romans; the sword forgotten for the plough; a teeming soil offering a tempting and defenceless prey to the fierce plunderers of the North. He will trace the newcomer step by step, in the permanent and wider influence he exerted; in the arms, the habits, the weapons and instruments he brought; in the monuments which he left of his victories over the inhabitants; in his camp and barrow; now wandering in the palaces of the Caesars, now filling sight and imagination with the material tokens of a great and romantic people. He will trace the Anglo-Saxon in his gradual assumption of Roman customs and usages; in his silent preparation for the still greater change which was to follow; in his mode of dealing with the conquered races; in his efforts to retain the valour, independence, and antiquity of his own; in the fusion of one and all in the bond and working of a common Christianity. Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon Kent, wrought out in clearer types, will help him to realize in colours more distinct, more certain, and more definite, Britannic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon England.

But in thus tracing out the influence of the new comers in their broader characteristics, by the general and local traditions and memorials of his county, the archaeologist will not neglect those less seen but not less subtle and more permanent changes introduced in the division and occupation of the land. He will not overlook the origin and causes of those divisions; the meanings of the words in which they are enshrined; their effect on the social and political condition of the country. All these are well worthy the consideration, as they are the special province of the philosophical archaeologist; and in all these the contributors to our pages may render essential service to the cause of history, whilst they are helping to place the ancient and distinguishing glories of their native county on an imperishable basis. We hesitate not to say, that a county history which should develop its subject in all its striking peculiarities, would do more than any other book towards giving us a living and clear insight into our national history.

With the occupation of the Saxon, Kent returns to the rank it first held on the arrival of the Roman; under Hengist and Ethelbert it once more takes the lead in those events which are henceforth to exercise a paramount influence on the nation. A new race of kings step forth, who have left the impression of kingship written more clearly on its annals than any other. Christianity elicits and shapes the dormant thought of loyalty to a spiritual and temporal supremacy. To Kent we turn and its sovereign Ethelbert for the first exemplification of that royal position, since so closely interwoven with all the political modifications and political strength of England. From this cradle the Church arose, second only in antiquity and scarcely second in power to the Crown; here it first brought into harmonious but mysterious operation the antagonistic elements of antagonistic populations. Here it stood forth at once the emblem of spiritual sovereignty, as of spiritual ministration; of distinct nationality, yet a world-wide brotherhood. It is to Canterbury that we turn, as the metropolitan church of England; the fruitful parent of a thousand churches; the type from which all others were derived; the cynosure towards which the hearts of Englishmen moved in the Middle Ages; their Rome and the centre of their worship, when some centre of visible unity was necessary in the distractions of Christendom and the feebleness of national incorporation. In Canterbury and its archbishops we behold the men who, like Lanfranc and Anselm, felt that their insular independence was compatible with their interest in the general well-being of Christendom; or like Stephen Langton, that their connection with Christendom could only be realized in its widest and most permanent forms by loyalty to the nation.

Under the shadow of the Church, arts, literature, and science spring to life; not less trade and commerce. The handicraft now developed in the free and skilled labourer of the United Kingdom, was brought out and trained for the uses of the Church. Its masons, carpenters, painters, workers in glass and metal, its weavers, its printers, its decorators of all kinds, even its merchants and traders, gathered and grew up under the wing of the Church, looking to its walls and monasteries, its spiritual and temporal influence, for protection, for instruction, for encouragement. In missals, coins, frescoes, tombs, altars, screens, and canopies; in carved work of wood, stone, and iron; in mullioned windows and cathedral canopies, we read not the traces of mere ecclesiastical magnificence, the sacrifices of early love and piety, the visible enshrinements of faith and hope, but the still surviving annals of the skill, industry, and patience of a race which, turning its energies in a different channel, has since achieved as splendid and abiding victories in the mine and the factory. Manchester and Birmingham are the lineal offsprings of Canterbury, York, and Lincoln; the cloth-workers of Kent have given place to the manufacturers of Leeds and Kidderminster. Yet the Church was the cradle of both; and whatever changes arts and commerce may undergo in the great law of progress, under the shadow of the Church grew up the sacred independence of righteous industry which prevented mechanical employments from degenerating into mere slavish taskwork, and redeemed the votaries of labour from the moral and physical degradation of the serf. In directions still humbler the influence of the cathedral is visible; in the knowledge and practice of agriculture brought by St. Augustine and his monks into England; in the application of skilled labour to the land; in the parks and gardens which grew up around its hallowed and peaceful precincts; in the constant endeavours of its Italian and Italianized archbishops to surround themselves with the natural and artificial productions of the South, thus preparing the way for that distinction which has won for Kent the title of the "Garden of England." Here local and minute inquiry may render essential service in a field of investigation as yet unwrought; the annals of Kentish horticulture are not less interesting, scarcely less important than the recovery of forgotten documents or buried political facts.

Yet one more great convulsion, one that is to link in bonds of lasting unity the disconnected yet noble elements of a great nation; to knit the wood and the stone, the delicate ironwork, the gold, and the precious stones; to bring out in fresh vigour and beauty the Celtic and the Roman combined with the Saxon; to give a greater finish, a more enduring grace, a deeper shade; to fill a brave and loyal land with chivalrous thoughts, and quicken its imagination with poetic visions

"Of pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With masque and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eve by haunted stream,"

Norman prowess and Norman adventure, Norman landlord and Saxon tenant, the baronial hall, its ladies and its minstrels, its tales of knightly daring and courtesy, of loyal dependency, of summer jousts and Christmas gambols, of armed retainers and faithful squires, are the growth of this new era. Hence the feelings of personal attachment to ancient houses and ancient race, mellowing in the process to kindlier and nobler relationship between the owner and tiller of the land, raising up throughout the country a state of life and society which exists in no other. Hence, in earlier days, sprang the Nevils, the Maminots, the Says, the De Crescies, the Clares, the Crevecreurs, the De Chilhams, De Thurnhams, De Leybournes, the Averenches, the De Burghs, the Criols, the Rokesles, the Cobhams, the Malmaynes, the Beauchamps, the Greys, the Poynings, the Valoignes, the Strabolgis, the Badlesmeres, the Northwoods, the Peches, the Freninghams, and Hauts. Hence, in after ages, sprang the Wyats, the St. Legers, the Cheynes, the Bulleyns, the Sidneys, the Guldefords, the Ropers, the Isleys, the Wottons, the Moyles, the Hales, the Cromers, the Harts, the Bretts, the Levesons, the Scots, the Roberts, the Kempes, the Monins, the Twysdens, the Derings, the Knatchbulls, the Tokes, the Darells, the Colepepers, the Walsinghams, and Fanes. Hence, too, the Astleys, the Richmond Stuarts, the Sackvilles, the Finches, the Vanes, the Filmers, the Brockmans, the Tuftons, the Botelers, the Clerks, the Selbys; the men who at all periods stood up for the freedom of England at home and her aggrandisement abroad. These are the men, and such as these, whose names are indelibly connected with our ancient castles and ancestral halls; our Leeds, Penshurst, Cobham, Cowling, Allington, Birling, Leybourn, Chilham, Sutton, Hever, Ollantigh, Hothfield, Tunbridge, Rochester, Dover, Lullingston, Sunenden, Eastwell, Roydon, Scadbury, Knole, Bedgbury, Mersham, Godinton, Hemsted, Glassenbury, Mereworth, Linton, Beachborough, Teston, Ford, the Motes. Need we insist on these matters, hitherto considered as the peculiar province of the archaeologist? With such examples as these to look back upon, we may be forgiven our attachment to the past; our reverence for the homes which gave birth to such men, and that home-loving and homely feeling which characterized their lives in its most chivalrous aspects. If that reverence for home and family which manifests itself under so many forms be in some respects our weakness, it is in more our glory and our strength. The Northern chief raised up his newborn child on the warrior's shield, to signify for what purpose he was born: even so, home has been the cradle of our greatest men, the shield on which they have been raised, not merely to defend their country, but to secure those blessings without which all countries are alike, and all indifferent. That has been our palladium against the encroachments of spiritual tyranny on one side, of temporal tyranny on the other. Here Englishmen, taking their stand, have reverenced monarchy as it reflected back to them an enlarged image of their own household, the Church as a family. Who shall wonder then that, in common with the most moral and most reverential nations of the ancient world, they have guarded with a religious care the traditions and successions of the family; that this reverence has mingled its roots and its branches with reverence for law and political order, until the one can be no longer disengaged from the other; until, taking further root, the same feeling has made its way into every form almost of art and literature; until no biography, however meagre, is without its charm, no portrait without its interest; no record of great men is allowed to perish; no letter or memorial of them that is not duly valued? The same feeling has displayed and fed itself by the jealous preservation of family archives, of family mansions, of tombs, of names that linger round old haunts in field and city; as if the spirit still flitted about its ancient resting-place.

For the elucidation of these relics of antiquity, though scattered and submerged in the deluge of time, tanquam tabulae naufragii, and demanding a tender and thoughtful hand for their collection and arrangement, we have genealogies and evidences, letters and archives. These are interesting to all, if we look to no higher motive than that curiosity implanted by nature in the breast of all, which urges them to become acquainted with other lands and other times than those in which they live; grateful and agreeable to that better and nobler feeling which teaches men to recognize their bond with the mighty soul of humanity in all ages, instinctive of solemn thoughts and reverential musings.

"I well consider all that ye have sayd;
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be; yet being rightly wayd,
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being doe dilate;
And turning to themselves at length againe
Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,
But they raigne over Change, and doe their states maintain."

Museums and libraries, public and private archives, abound with treasures of this kind; in many respects the most valuable, in all respects the most interesting, that can be furnished to a journal like ours. Here most of our readers can lend us effectual aid; and united efforts, easily borne by many, may be prosecuted more efficiently than by few, and produce a harvest of materials for the illustration of our county biographies that cannot be surpassed. One of the charms of archaeology at least, like that of natural history, consists in its eminently social nature; in the employment it offers to all, in the services which all can render. From some of our correspondents-and we expect their name will be Legion-we shall look for narratives of discoveries already made or hereafter to be prosecuted in their immediate neighbourhoods; for descriptions of the relics turned up at the unearthing of tumuli; for accounts of ancient tombs. Others will tell us of their local traditions, or send us letters and genealogies of families living or extinct in their neighbourhood. Let all, now and then in their lives, revisit the past, and do their best to refresh the memories of ancient things; let them with loving sympathy wipe away the dust or remove the moss and incrustations which have gathered round the records of our long-buried but not forgotten worthies. For that is the character of our land.

How much that is valuable has grown out of this reverence for ancient families and ancient forms, we ourselves are witnesses. Living in the past more than any other nation, shaping our course by that past, recurring to past experience, rewarding, honouring, and celebrating the thoughts and actions of past men and ages, carving out for ourselves from the expanse of time a broader horizon, we pass from the familiarity of the present into the keen enjoyment of distant antiquity. And if the rapid sweep of our progress as a nation, instead of rendering us indifferent to the deeds and wisdom of their forefathers, has implanted in us a keener relish, a more thorough appreciation for ancient but not forgotten things; if at this time above all others, when we have drifted so widely from the past that it might be thought the past could yield no light to those inquiries we now are most deeply interested in; if in an age more devoted than any other to utilitarianism, the history of the past has received double honour, and the lore and civilization of the past are more duly valued; may we not expect that out of those inquiries to which the pages of this journal will be devoted, innumerable vestiges of events, of scenes, of life and manners, will present themselves to the future historian, which shall enable him to place these records in still clearer light; to represent the past in its fullest and liveliest proportions, to fix the uncertain, to clear the obscure; and when the mission of this nation is accomplished, if ever it is accomplished, to leave to future generations the exact form and pressure of a great people, from infancy to decay, who have not lived on God's earth in vain, or been entrusted with such vast powers and empires for fruitless and transitory purposes? By memorials such as these, carefully and consecutively gathered into many folios during the last century; by scattered fragments of the wreck; by inscriptions, coins, and etymologies, the scorn of flippant wits in a flippant age, the great comparative anatomist of ancient history was enabled to read the lesson of the past, and to teach men to find their way by as sure a clue as the disciple of Buckland or Owen reanimates a world of megatheria and hylmosauri. We expect no less from the labours of the English archaeologist.

These harvests, no scanty ones, are to be reaped in all directions; no scanty ones, not unworthy of our common country, or that still smaller spot of it to which we owe our birth and the innumerable silent influences which that soil has sent into our souls with all its breathing traditions. Who shall count or weigh them? Who shall say how the associations of our native land may have grown up with bone and sinew; how far the firm will has been fostered, the imagination fed by the ancient memories of the soil? But we shall need all hands to help us, and all may; we shall need the full strength implied in our motto to accomplish our task, "The might of Kentish men, and the zeal of Kentish maidens." Hitherto they have lent us effectual aid to launch our boat; let them speed the good ship on its course, not with their good wishes only, but by inspiring, as they can, none better, many other labourers with their zeal in helping forward the work. Then, if we cannot place Kentish Archaeology on a footing worthy of our county, worthy too of our common country, more than all, worthy of the auspices under which we have commenced, and the aid and good wishes accorded to us, we shall take up our old local proverb, proud as it may appear, "Not in Kent, not in Christendom;" the thing is not to be done, or not done in this generation.

*** For the badge of our Society, which adorns the title-page of this Volume, we are indebted to the taste and munificence of three ladies, daughters of the Earl of Abergavenny, Lady Caroline Nevill, Lady Augusta Mostyn, and Lady Isabel Bligh.