Heraldic Notices of the Church of St Martin, Herne

THE CHURCH OE ST. MARTIN, HERNE. 85 The Leverick family (shield 5) were of Ridgeway, to the south-east of Heme church, where the house is gone but a splendid barn remains. The last of them in the male Une was Anthony Leverick (d. 1511) to whom there is a small brass in the church, and whose only daughter and heiress Parnell carried Ridgeway by marriage to Edward Monins of Swanton in Lydden. Their daughter AUce married Thomas Hamond of St. Alban's Court, Nonington, where the arms of Hamond impaling Monins and Leverick stUl remain in painted glass. Martha, daughter of Thomas and AUce, became the first wife of John Sea of Heme (see shield 21). It wiU be noted that the arms of Leverick of Heme differ from those of Leverick of Ash-next-Sandwich (see p. 101), which appear in the cloister of Canterbury (No. 219) and are azure a chevron between three leopards' faces or. The shields 9-19, with No. 6, are associated with the history of the manor of Hawe, the house of which is about half a mUe eastwards from the church, near the Broomfield road. At the end of the fourteenth century this manor belonged to Sir WiUiam Waleys, who married Margaret, daughter of Sir John Seynclere. Pieces of worked stone are said to have been unearthed at Hawe at various times, and from this circumstance, remembering the extensive moat and the fact that the height above the house is stiU sometimes called Castle Down, we may conjecture that Sir WUUam's residence was a fortified house of some importance. The Waleys famUy were associated with several districts in Kent in the fourteenth century, a WiUiam Waleys of Maidstone bemg recorded in 1325, and Godfrey de Waleys having purchased the manor of Grippenden (perhaps Crippenden in Cowden) in 1311. The family also held the manor of Thanington, near Canterbury. Margaret, only daughter and heiress of Sir WiUiam Waleys, married Peter Halle of Heme, bringing to him the manor of Hawe, and it is to their brasses in the church that shields 9 and 10 are annexed. The HaUes (or, as they were caUed at an earUer date, atte or del HaUes) had been long settled in Heme, as may be shown from various records,