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

See http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/18/12/00.htm

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

See http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/18/17/00.htm

‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Deer Parks in Kent’, Susan Pittman, PhD Kent, 2011 now online at

http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/17/01/2013/06/000.htm