William Somner (1606-1669) 23-3-2019
Conference & Exhibition celebrating the 350th Anniversary of this great Kentish scholar
More details on the attached poster.
Conference & Exhibition celebrating the 350th Anniversary of this great Kentish scholar
More details on the attached poster.
South East Region Industrial Archaeology Conference
KAS will be hosting the South East Region Industrial Archaeology Conference 2019.
The event will be held on April 13th at Dartford Grammar School.
Full details from Mike Clinch. Mike Clinch
CASTLE LIFE IN KENT AND SUSSEX
This day school will explore the life of people living in castles in Kent and Sussex in the Middle Ages. We will take an overview of castles as both fortresses and homes of the aristocracy, but focus on as much as possible on all those who lived and worked around them – from cooks to carpenters, hunters to poachers, and more. Our specific examples of castles and their estates will be Scotney, Bodiam, Ightham Mote and Knole, and we will draw on the latest research and new techniques for investigating past lives and landscapes
It is amazing that such a small place as Ebony has produced such a lot of Wills in a relatively short space of time. There are a lot of surnames, field names, place names in them, and also, when you read through them, quite a few occupations – fisherman, smith, haberdasher, etc. plus most of them left money to the church, including John Raynold, who left money to build a new church there in about 1520
The cemetery, which opened in 1869, was needed because the Chatham burial ground at Whiffen’s Avenue was coming to the end of it’s life.
All Saints Church, Maidstone, which was built by Archbishop Courtney, from 1395, is a major church building in the perpendicular style, the finest of this style in Kent. The interior is over 90 feet in width, with an equally impressive length and height. The pavement is “choc a bloc” with ledger stones, mainly of the 18th and 19th centuries (inscriptions can be seen online on the church website). There are some impressive medieval tombs, including that of Archbishop Courtney, himself.
73 Abstracts of Hythe Wills ranging in date from 1471 to 1558 from Arthur Hussey’s notebooks in the Kent Archaeological Society’s Library are now online, together with a comprehensive index of all names and places mentioned in them
‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Deer Parks in Kent’, Susan Pittman, PhD Kent, 2011 now online at
Pilgrims, Peasants and Paths in the Middle Ages
The day offers a broad overview of the changing relationship between the Sussex landscape and the people who lived here, from the earliest arrivals. Our speakers are specialists in their periods, and will identify key themes for which some evidence remains. The emphasis will be on how new ideas resulted in significant changes in the use of the Sussex landscape.