The Valley of Holmesdale: Its Evolution and Development

156 rt THE 'VAttEY O:'.F HOLMESDALE.)) Holmesdale, lying between the other two. East Kent contents itself with the simpler division of Upland and Weald. Diagram No. 1 makes this clear. The principle of communal responsibility for individual action was approved and enforced by our Saxon forefathers at a very early date, and this has a most important bearing on our subject, and it is proposed in this article to trace the evolution of the Holmesdale, and to trace it by the help primarily of the basis of population, upon which it is generally admitted our comity was first subdivided by our Saxon forefathers, who desired to give effect to this principle. As a natural sequence of this enquiry, we have the deductions to be drawn from the relative positions of the places from which such subdivisions drew their nomenclature. Such an enquiry must practically be limited to the period covered by existing documentary evidence, and before touching upon any evidence so comparatively recent as the records in question, a short reference to the earlier surviving local indications of man's handiwork may not be out of place. In the progress of the inhabitants of any given area foUl" stages can usually be noted . We have first the savage huntsman, secondly the pastoral herdsman, thirdly the agricultural ploughman, and fourthly the manufacturing artisan. At the date of the Roman occupation we find that while East Kent was already in the third, West Kent was hardly out of the second, and the Weald had not emerged from the first ; no pru,t 0£ the county had yet reached the fom·th stage. The development of our county has been largely a question of accessibility. Forming, as it does, the nearest point of communication between England and the rest of Europe, we should readily expect to find the Upland intersected, as it in fact is, by a great highway running from west to east and thence to the coast. In Diagram No. 1 this highway is m.al'ked in a fi.rm line. It will be noticed that it pass􀃈s outside and to the north of the Holmesdale Valley, and runs from London to Ganter .. bury, and there breaks up into three branches, communica