Reviews

REVIEWS Framed Buildings of the Weald. By R. T. Mason. Pp. 96, pl. xxvii. Published by the Author, Handcross, Sussex. 1964. It may seem surprising that so few relatively simple, yet authoritative, studies of the vernacular architecture of a particular region have appeared, yet, when we consider the progress now being ·made in this subject, it could be argued that any such summary at this date must be at best, an interim report. Mr. Mason's work resembles, in format and arrangement, Mr. H. Forrester's The Timber1ramed Houses of Essex (1959), but whereas Mr. Forrester relied largely on the survey of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, made some forty years earlier, while taking some cognizance of recent re-assessment of the same material, Mr. Mason has himself discovered many of the most important examples in his study-and promptly published them in Sussex Archc,eological Collections. That the reviewer himself quite accidentally discovered the most critical of an; Channels Brook, near Horsham, shows how incomplete the overall survey still is. The wealth of timber building in the Weald has, of course, long been known: some of it has been treated, if superficially, in Davie and Dawber's Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Kent and Sussex (1900), and more fully in that splendid pioneer work, R. Nevill's Old Cottage and Domestic Architecture in S. W. Surrey (1889). In view of the dependence of architecture at all levels on geology, it is an admirable idea to get a way from county bounds and to treat the Weald in its widest sense, as a unity. But whether all Mr. Mason's generalizations can be sustained is another matter; this Weald is a large area, geologically diversified, broken by valleys (above all, the great Vale of Sussex, where most of Mr. Mason's experience lies) and receptive of influences from the various regions that surround it. The book comprises an historical introduction, discussions of plans, types, modifications and-the most valuable part-of structural details and, finally, a selection of grander ('supra-vernacular') houses, individually described. It would be unfair to judge the substance of this most useful work by certain controversial assumptions in the historical chapter, but it is certainly wrong, in view of the dependencies of extra-wealden estates, to represent a distribution of Domesday manors as a pattern of 'inhabitation' at that date. The shapes of 252 REVIEWS parishes, always a good indication of early settlement-patterns, are very different in east Weald from the long strips of Sussex, south Surrey and the Sevenoaks area, and colonization is a more complex problem than the book would suggest. Mr. Mason is right to point out the steady improvement of individual holdings from the thirteenth century onwards: the same might be observed in the comparable and more forested parts of Essex and south Suffolk. But it will be necessary to find out how evenly this amelioration is distributed, and then to plot the areas where it is most marked against those where, after exhaustive examination, everything seems to have been rebuilt in the latest Middle Ages and no early houses are recorded. As Mr. Mason realizes, the Weald had its 'Great Rebuilding' in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and Dr. Hoskins's now famous phrase about the activities of c. 1570-1640 simply does not apply to the Weald-nor to south-eastern England in general. There it was the Great Conversion, and late medieval houses exist in their thousands. Why perpetuate Dr. Hoskins's cliche, out of its lVIidland and south-western context, as a 'Second Great Rebuilding'? In the chapter called 'Plans and General Design' the diagrams are clear and schematic and -the whole argument deserves careful study, though unti). we lmow more about the functions of the minor groundfloor rooms the argument must remain provisional. The revelation of base-orucks in Sussex, due chiefly to Mr. Mason himself, may still be a surprise to many. One, at Ticehurst is a few yards from the border of Kent, and the reviewer has recently discovered one in Smarden. Further field-work will doubtless reveal more of what must have been the predecessor of the 'normal' hall-house. Nor, apart from New Romney, properly beyond the bounds, do we know of any certain aisled building in the Kentish Weald. It is wrong to say that no recognizable kitchens have survived; that at Wilsley, Cranbrook, is well in the Weald, even if that at Cha.ring and the fine example in series with the house, at Court Lodge, Brook, are just outside. Nor is it right to suggest, for Kent at least, that tile-roofing became common at the same time as tile-hanging on the walls. Whether or not thatch was once more common, rooftiles are quite usual in excavations from the thirteenth century. It should be possible to distinguish the pitch required for thatch from that for tiles. When a very low pitch (e.g. Great Engeham, Woodchurch) occurs, it may well have been for sea-borne (not Horsham) slates. There is, of course, a full discussion of the so-called 'Wealden' (recessed fronted) house, with many sub-types described. Picturesque though the type is, it is 'not a fundamental category-what matters ia the unitary hipped roof. In the west Sussex Weald many, perhaps most, unitary-roofed halls are totally without jettying (as is illustrated 253 REVIEWS at Edmond's Farm, Balcombe), and even in the east Weald I believe those with only longitudinal jettying are commoner. The particular mutation, with recessed front and two parallel plates, may be of urban and distant origin and, as I have shown in Culture and Environment, its distribution in Kent is thickest around Maidstone, outside the Weald, while in the Weald, west of the Rother valley it is distinctly rare. It would be better to call it the 'Kentish' house. The really mature close-studded 'Wealdens' are a well-defined group, and the conventional date, repeated by Mr. Mason, of c. 1480 is too early; ornament and indirect documentation show that many are as late as the 1520s. Mr. Mason notes that many 'Wealdens' are town houses, allowing the name of 'town' to anything with a fairly unbroken street-development. He does not. notice how many are, or were, inns, even outside their normal distribution. He discusses the effects of petty urbanization and industry and the extraordinary prosperity of such places as Cranbrook that continued during the 'Great Conversion'. Under this head he says something of later techniques, but he does not give the eighteenth century the fair apportionment that Mr. Forrester does. In the age of clap-boarding and mathematical tiles many new buildings were erected which, though lighter, were equally timber-framed. Nor has he much to say of anything other than dw􀃐lling-houses. The Weald has few large barns, but it has many small ones, and it also has a few timber belfries comparable with those of forest Essex. While throughout England a short-cut to knowledge of local framing methods is to be found in the close study of timber church-porches. The long section on details of construction is excellent. I offer a few comments that do not lessen my high estimation of it. Surely the down-braced crown-post is really the commonest: not only is it usual in barns, but every 'free' crown-post in a house is flanked by two embedded crown-posts of this form. Three major varieties of wall- ,frame are distinguished, but in the first type the arch-braced and down-braced forms are quite distinct, though they may occur together, and the close-studded form usually also haa bracing, though less commonly in mid-Sussex than elsewhere. In screen-walls vertical lapped boarding and many varieties of post-and-panel are illustrated; another form found in Kent is horizontal boarding, edge-to-edge. Though the treatment is evolutionary, the finer study of joints may come to modify some of Mr. Mason's views. This work should be both a guide and a stimulus to students, not least in the Kentish Weald, where the obvious is so plentiful that, as Mr. Mason's maps show, the less obvious has been neglected. And, if Mr. Mason's discoveries in a few years are a foretaste, who knows .what may appear. S. E. RIGOLD 254 REVIEWS English Local History. Tlie Past and the Future. An Inaugural Lecture, by W. G. Hoskins, Hatton Professor of English History. Leicester University Press, 1966. Pp. 22. This welcome summary of the state of English Local Historical Study, is based on the thesis that without the microscopic assessment of the local historian, general history tends to resolve itself into a series of unrealistic generalizations. Professor Hoskins seeks that local history should pass out of the antiquarian stage of collecting facts for their own sake and move to the more scientific one of asking the right questions, an approach which he illustrates from the studies of demography and topography. AJ3 always lucid and stimulating, he presents to the local historian the challenge of restoring unity to the study of man in what he terms 'Human Ecology'. Here is both the justμication and the pattern of a search which many, amateur and professional alike, have been pursuing with varying success. F.H. TM Arthurwn Material in the Chronicles. By R.H. Fletcher. 9 X 6 in. Pp. 335 + ix. 2nd edn., 1966, expanded by a bibliography and · critical essay for the period 1905-1965 by Roger Sherman Loomis. Burt Franklin, New York, 1966. This work was first published in 1906 as volume 10 of (Harvard) Studies and Notes in Phil,ol,ogy and Literature. The Arthurian Material of the title comprises all that has appeared in the pseudo-history of Britain from the accession of Constans to the passing of Arthur, and the author collected and commented on such material from more than two hundred chronicles, chiefly those of Great Britain and France. Of the result Professor Loomis writes, 'Fletcher's excellent work . . established itself at once as a sober and reliable work of reference in a field full of interest but confused by antiquated editions, forged data and baseless speculation' (p. 317); For a long time the book has been out of print and difficult to obtain and another edition was overdue and one that should incorporate a critical appendix which should take account of the results of sixty years of scholarship which have accumulated since the work was first published. Scholars of the subject owe a double debt of gratitude to Burt Franklin for publishing this new edition and for enlisting the very great lmowledge of Professor Loomis in providing the critical discussion which both enriches and brings Fletcher's work up to date. The referenc·e on page 333 to volume lxxxviii (88) of .Archr,eologi,a Oantiana should read volume lxxvili (78). J.H.E. 255 REVIEWS William Lambarde: Elizabethan Jurist, 1536-1601. By Wilbur Dunkel. 8½ X 5½ in. Pp. 210. Rutgers University Press, 1965. $7.50. That one of the most famous of Kentish men, William Lambarde, author of the first county history, A Perambulation of Kent, should have lacked a full-scale biography for so long is surprising, though possibly biographers may have been deterred by the scarcity of material illustrating Lambarde's personal life and the fact that many of Lambarde's surviving manuscripts were sold to America forty years ago and so have not been readily available in England. For this reason the biography by Professor Wilbur Dunkel, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, New York, is to be welcomed. Professor Dunkel has collected together the available facts concerning Lambarde's life and work as an historian, writer, lawyer, justice of the peace, custodian of records and benefactor of the poor and clearly shows what an outstanding and interesting roan he was, one indeed who warrants a fuller and more detailed study by an historian or a lawyer rather than by a scholar of English literature. As far as Lambarde's work as a local justice is concerned, Professor Dunkel sees him as a unique figure, a learned lawyer dominating fe1low justices in Kent who had few interests beyond 'hawks and dogs' and who for the most part resembled Shakespeare's Justice Shallow. This is somewhat unfair to the Kentish country gentry of the period, some of whom, in their scholarship and integrity, resembled Lambarde himself who was more typical than is allowed. Nor is it made completely clear in the book that Kent was divided for the purposes of justice into East and West Kent and it was not in the whole county but in the Western Division and at West Kent Quarter Sessions, meeting only twice a year at Easter and Michaelmas (a fact which Lambarde himself deplored in his book Eirenarcha), that Lambarde played his important part. This part wa.s not quite so important in some respects as Professor Dunkel asserts. The establishment of a House of Correction at Maidstone in 1583, for instance, was not Lambarde's personal idea in advance of legislation for such establishments had been advocated by the Poor Law Act of 1576 and London Bridewell had been set up as early as about 1557. Nor did Lambarde decide personally which criminals should be punished summarily and which should be sentenced at Quarter Sessions since those offences which could be dealt with by justices out of sessions and those which had to be heard at Quarter Sessions were clearly defined, and this is carefully explained by Lambarde himself in Eirenarcha. Turning to another matter, Lambarde was not the first person in Kent to endow almshouses after the Reformation, as Professor Dunkel states, though his College for the Poor at Greenwich was one of the larger and more important foundations. These examples and others which could be quoted, of false emphasis due to 256 REVIEWS lack of background local and legal knowledge mar what is in many respects a useful and interesting book. Certainly Lambarde's many interests and talents are fully set out in the book. A lawyer by profession, son of a London merchant who had bought an estate in Kent, twice married to daughters of country gentlemen in Kent, he thus became a Kentish country gentleman himself; historian of the county as well as a legal historian, he was well fitted to become, both as regards theory 􀃒nd practice, a prominent justice of the peace. The handbook which he wrote for justices of the peace, Eirenarcha, was a deservedly popular and useful work, not because the justices of the time were necessarily uneducated or inefficient but because they needed guidance through the ever-increasing mass of duties which the Elizabethan government placed upon them which earlier manuals for justices did not supply. The charges, which Lambarde delivered to the grand jury and to the juries of enquiry at West Kent Quarter Sessions and at various special sessions, show his conception of the principles of justice and his desire that it should operate locally, and his Ephemeris, or justice's note-book, shows him engaged in the routine day-to-day out of sessions activities of a local justice in his own immediate locality, of a kind similar to those recorded in other surviving justices' note-books for a slightly later period in Kent. Interesting glimpses are also given, in the material quoted, of how a man like Lambarde, having contacts in London with men connected with the court and the government could be used to carry out government policy in the locality and to see that legislation and Privy Council orders were not a dead letter. The book is prefaced with an interesting prefatory article 'Historians Courageous' by Catherine Drinker Bowen, illustrating the political importance of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century antiquaries including Lambarde. Altogether then, this book whets the appetite with a desire to see full justice done to Lambarde as a man of many parts in the context of his period, in some further study, but in the meantime it provides a ·source of useful information about him. E. MELLING The Roman City of London. By Ralph Merrifield. 8½ X 5½ in. Pp. xvii + 344 + 140 plates + 31 line drawings and detached map. London: Benn, 1965. 63s. To all of us in Kent the story of Roman London is of especial interest, and our member Mr. Ralph Merrifield, Deputy Keeper of the Guildhall Museum, is much to be congratulated on the successful completion of a study which will appeal to the informed public and which, moreover, will rank as the standard authority on its subject for 257 REVIEWS many years to come. It was not an easy book to write. The first-and until now the last-full account of Roman London was the great inventory volume published in 1928 by the Royal Commission on Histotical Monumemts under the guiding hand of (Sir) Mortimer Wheeler. Since that date much more has become known, particularly as the result of careful and planned excavation on sites left derelict after war-time bombing and on sites examined, often in emergency, in advance of modern building operations. The author wisely restricts his study to the walled city and its immediate environs. His first chapter on archooology in the City of London will be an eye-opener to many people. There is certainly great public interest, but the 80,000 visitors who saw the excavation of the famous temple of Mithras in 1954- were only interested enough to contribute on average less than a penny each to the voluntary collection towards expenses. Permission to excavate is not always readily granted: time is certainly of the essence in modern building contracts, but Mr. Merrifield does not overstate his case when he draws attention to the lack of co-operation in some quarters. In the future detailed and controlled excavation is likely to become even more difficult as new building quickly follows demolition. With the regrettable lack of adequate financial support we must be all the mor􀃤 grateful for the work of the City of London Excavation Group, a team of properly directed volunteer diggers which augments the all-too-slender field staff of the Guildhall Museum. The problem will become acute when there is an opportunity to investigate once again the site of the two leading public buildings, the basilica and the forum. In an Historical Outline Mr. Merrifield considers fully the implications of older finds and of recent major discoveries, the Blaokfriars boat with its foundered cargo of Kentish ragstone and the Cripplegate fort among them. It is an interesting thought that London Bridge may have been started as a task to occupy the time of the considerable invasion force under Aulus Plautius while it awaited the arrival of the Emperor Claudius. And yet there is no evidence of any main roads direct from the northern bridgehead. London, it seems, was a planned road centre rather than a natural growth at road junctions. The author has wise words of restraint on the dating of the city wall, and particularly on the significance of the ninth-century pendant found above the gravel floor of Bastion 14. As an introduction to the all-important Gazetteer, there is a full and valuable account of the topography of Roman London. In it there are notes on streets and structures, cemeteries, the Cripplegate fort, the wall and its bastions, set against the background of physical geography and human growth and activities. The Gazetteer itself contains more than 550 . detailed entries written in a clear concise form 258 REVIEWS which must provide the basis for all future work. Each site is marked on a loose four-colour map, the excellent work of Mr. E. A. Chambers, placed for easy reference in a pocket at the back of the book. The map is on such a scale that future discoveries can easily be added by the owner of the book. A practical guide to the visible remains of Roman London, no less than 140 first-rate photographs with helpful and informative notes, and a really adequat.e index all add to the value of this book. The author deserves our best thanks, as do his publishers for encouraging him to produce the sort of study he had firmly in mind. RoN.ALD JESSUP The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60. By A. M. Everitt. 8¾ X 5½ in. Pp. 356. Leicester University Press, 1966. 358. Those who a.re already familiar with Dr. Everitt's work on the politics and personalities of Kent in the mid-seventeenth century, through his articles and his unpublished doctoral thesis, will welcome the appearance of his researches in a more readily accessible form, available to a wider public, in his recently published book. This is of great interest to the historians of both national and local affairs, showing how these impinged on each other in one county. Dr. Everitt skilfully sets out, using a wealth of material both national and local, the background of and the detailed events leading up to incidents in Kent which had an influence on the course of national affairs. These include, for example, the rising of 1648 which sparked off the Second Civil War, and the formulation and presentation of the moderate Kentish Petition of March 1642, the rejection of which by the House of Commons and the harsh treatment of its sponsors, was regarded by the historian, J. R. Gardiner, as a point of no return in the build-up towards the Civil War. This is history in depth and as more of such detailed studies come to be made for different parts of the country, views of national events will inevitably be modified and amplified by them. Local historians int.erested primarily in Kent itself will also find much to interest them. They can see how their ancestors set about choosing their members of parliament, how public opinion was formu􀄍 lated and expressed, how the county was administered during and following the war, how strong was family solidarity and the bonds of kinship and also how insular was local feeling at the time. Dr. Everitt sees the results of the Civil War as the victory of the nation-state over the local county communities and the Restoration as a reversal of this 259 22 REVIEWS and a return to the administration of the localities by the natural leaders of the local communities. Indeed this is a book which stresses the importance of personalities and personal relationship rather than economic factors. Intense dislike of Sir Anthony Weldon, chairman of the County Committee, for instance, was one of the main causes of the 1648 rising. A man such as Sir Edward Dering, one of the original members of parliament for Kent in the Long Parliament, is shown to reflect closely the feelings of the bulk of the country gentry of Kent who were essentially moderates. Sir Edward, both during his lifetime and afterwards, has been misunderstood and stigmatized as a turncoat. Interested in church affairs and anti-Laudian, he introduced the Root and Branch Bill but later spoke against it and so earned the disapproval of Parliament. Subsequently, he fought for the King but ultimately weary of the ultra-royalists at the court at Oxford and a sick man he left the King, accepted a Parliamentary pardon and returned home to Kent to die. But Sir Edward, as Dr. Everitt stresses, was always consistent in his dislike of extremism and his firm belief in the middle way. It is good to find justice done to Dering in this book. His was the dilemma of the moderate of any time and he typified the difficulties in which the moderate gentry of Kent found themselves during the political and administrative upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. People's conduct may be influenced by many factors, some economic, some personal but in the end it is people who make history, not abstract forces, and in this absorbing book individual people are shown making history in Kent. E. MELLING Town and, Oounflry in Roman Britain. By A. L. F. Rivet. 8¼ X 5¼ in. Pp. 196, 1 plate, 9 maps and plans. Hutchinson University Library, paperback edition, 1966. 12.s. 6d. The history of Roman Britain has of late become increasingly interesting, not only to scholars and students, but to the ordinary reader as well. This handy and readable book is l)lost valuable for all who are thus interested in the subject, both those who attend schools and lectures and those who engage in excavation on Romano-British sites. It is a book pre-eminently for the amateur, though the professional arch$ologist and historian may learn much from it. The author is concerned with the civil aspect of Roman Britain, and brings together in an easy and well-expressed form the most up-to-date information in this field, discussing the towns with their buildings, and the countryside with its farmhouses and villas. He considers in detail the nature of the evidence before us, surveying the Celtic baok- 260 REVIEWS ground, the Roman administration, and the romanization of town and country. His chapter on Political Geography is especially good. He discusses here the problems of the colonire and civitates, with the tribal cantons, including extended accounts of the main tribes, all clearly illustrated by a political map showing the cantonal boundaries, as far as they are known, and their capitals. The reader of this book cannot fail to gain an overall picture of the civil aspect of Roman Britain, which will do much to equip him with the specific knowledge necessary for student and excavator alike. The bibliographies are especially good. A complete bibliography of ancient literature is added to comprehensive bibliographies at the end of each of the six chapters into which the book is divided, that on Political Geography bringing together the main sources for our knowledge of the tribes of Roman Britain. There are also no less than four indices-Ancient Persons and Authorities, Modern Persons and Authorities, Geographical, and Subject. All this matter is included in 196 pages, a masterpiece of condensed information, which is at the same time written in a clear and easy style. A highly recommended book. G.W.M. The Lordship of Canterbury: An Essay on Medieval Society. By F. R. H. Du Boulay. Pp. xiv + 418 with frontispiece and 4 maps. Thomas Nelson (Printers) Ltd., London and Edinburgh, 1966. 84s. Professor Du Boulay has written a most valuable book and has succeeded in bringing together a vast amount of information which has hitherto been available only from very scattered sources. At long last at least part of the story of the evolution and management of the Canterbury archiepiscopal estates has been written. The story has been written from some of its earliest beginnings in the three hundred or so years before the Conquest, through the rich years of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the leaner middle centuries when much was lost, to the final dissolution ·when the Crown took many properties from Archbishop Cranmer, albeit by exchange, and considerably reduced the extent of the archiepiscopal estates. Over the years the archbishops of Canterbury had amassed properties in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex and London, more often than not by gift, but sometimes by purchase, and even by purchase out of their own pockets if they deemed it expedi􀃜nt. The list of estates is formidable and included such properties as Knole in Sevenoaks where Bourgchier liked to stay; the manors of Otford, Maidstone, Aldington, beloved by Warham, Saltwood, Oharing, favoured by both Dunstan and Becket, Wingham and Wrotham, all in Kent; Lambeth 261 REVIEWS exchanged with Rochester; Croydon in Surrey; Harrow, Hayes, Pinner and Sudbury in Middlesex; and Mayfield and South Malling in Sussex. Some were bought and sold. Some exchanged. Some fell into ruin or were demolished. But Archbishop Cranmer by his bad management and hopeless debts lost virtually all that was left save Lambeth-and this because the King did not favour the damp. In contrast with the northern archdiocese, and with other dioceses, the archdiocese of Canterbury was extremely wealthy. At the dissolution the Canterbury. estates were worth well over £3,000, while those of the neighbouring bishopric of Rochester were worth only £411. Yet both had followed the same pattern of evolution. Both the archbishop and the bishop were titular heads of priories from which they had gradually become separated with their own nucleus of property distinct from that of the monks. Both were equally favoured in the early years by kings and patrons but while Rochester remained poor, Canterbury grew rich. The reason is not far to seek and this book in some senses provides -the answer. The importance of Canterbury as the senior archdiocese allowed it to call earlier on a group of men who could run the estates as a secular concern for the archbishop. Their management of the estates is well documented and the evidence available ha£ been well used. The author has shown very clearly how the estates were run but seems to imply that it was a unique system whereas it is fairly clear that except for local differences in methods of land-holding the archbishops followed more or less the same pattern of estate management, but on a much larger scale, as other secular and ecclesiastical bodies. The general pattern of increasing costs leading to more and more commutation of services and increase in independence of tenants follows the usual trends, so that there emerged on the Canterbury estates in the fifteenth century a type of tenant with a strong and solid family background, well known in his particular area who had grown up against the background of the manorial and hundred courts, and who, when the finances of the archbishopric became particularly difficult, became the demesne farmers of the sixteenth century. The book is very well balanced but it suffers in some ways from the enormous mass of material available. The book is in parts altogether too meticulous and difficult to read. One gets the impression that for reasons of space a great deal had to be left out. No attempt has been made to conclude the findings. The book stops short and abruptly almost in mid-air. The maps are useful but are too spidery and the print and symbols far too small for rapid reference. The index is good and accurate but is rather limited in its scope, and although the list of contents to some extent counteracts this defect, it does not always do so. M.O. 262 REVIEWS [(ent. By Marcus Crouch. 8¾ X 5¾ in. Pp. 264, 39 plates, I fig., 1 map. Batsford, 1966. 25s. Adequately to present a word-portrait of the county of Kent within the confines of a 264-page book is a formidable task. When Edward Hasted published his exhaustive county history, he needed four folio volumes to complete the task, while a short list, recently compiled by 1\fr. Frank Jessup, of the best work of all the writers who have contributed to our knowledge of Kent local history contains some 264 titles, so Mr. Marcus Crouch is to be congratulated on the successful compilation of his Kent and in condensing the subjectmatter to a reasonable length. He provides the key to his approach in the first chapter 'I have elected to make my book in the form of a series of journeys ... "rural rides" based on the use of a motor car .. . away from the main roads.' So after this introductory chapter, which provides an excellent synopsis of the county's history, the subsequent eight chapters are in the form of itineraries with the titles 'Kentish Subtopia', 'The Western Downs', 'The Stone Hills', 'Weald and Marsh', 'The Medway', 'The Eastern Downs', 'The Stour Valley', and 'Seaboard and River'. Obviously Mr. Crouch's main objective has been to provide a book -largely a guide in character but with much scholarly observation and comment--that will appeal and be useful to the visitor, be he or she from other parts of the country or from overseas, who is anxious to be informed how best to see and enjoy all that this historic corner of England has to offer. However, this does not mean that Kentish folk themselves will not derive great enjoyment and add to their knowledge of buildings, places and associations, from a perusal of its pages. Readers, and there will be many, who follow Mr. Crouch as guide, will thank him for all the out-of-the-way information he has to offer. To quote just one example. How many motorists following the unimportant by-road from the A20 to Eastling and Faversham would think of turning into the park drive to Otterden Place with the knowledge that near the mansion they would find such an unusual building as a Georgian-period parish church, 'a singularly perfect example'? Unfortunately considerations of space have prevented the mention of many interesting places, particularly some fine and historic houses of which the county is so rich. For this the author offers an apology. 'I regret, too, having to omit a visit to the great show-house of Godinton, outside Ashford, and to the more remote manor-house of Acrise in the rolling country behind Folkestone.' In perusing a book so readable as this is, it may seem ungracious to express criticism of any statements or points of detail. No author 263 REVIEWS surveying an area. the size of Kent can be expected to have a complete and intimate knowledge of all the localities he describes and, in consequence, on occasions he may be guilty of some unfortunate slip. For example, one must disagree with the statement (p.16) that the Stour flows north; rising at Lenham and joining the sea at Pegwell Bay, its course is definitely west to east. Again, is papermaking the oldest Kent industry after iron-work:ing1 Cloth weaving surely has an equally valid claim to antiquity. The eighteenth-century water-pavilion or boat-house rising from the lake adjoiping the original Court Lodge site at Harrietsham is not in the form of a Greek temple, while there is no stream here 'hurrying off the downs'; an immediately adjoining spring provides the lake's water. But slight errors such as these in no way detract from the general excellence of this useful guide. As is customary with books emanating from the house of Batsford the photographic illustrations are all of high quality while the book is provided with an excellent index. R.H.G. 264