The Tanners of Wrotham Manor 1400-1600

ArticlesVolume 126

25 Jun

Written By KAS

jayne semple

This paper describes the trade of tanning and the lives of the tanners in the manor of Wrotham in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The manor stretched from the North Downs along the valley of the river Bourne into the Weald and was divided into six boroughs. Tanning took place in four of them; Nepicar, Winfield, Hale and Roughway.

The manor offered all the conditions for the existence of industry. An early-enclosed woodland-pastoral system of agriculture gave rise to weak manorial organisation. This gave freedom to customary tenants, who were in effect freeholders, to run their affairs as they chose. Gavelkind, or partible inheritance, encouraged people to stay in their native places to work their own land but also to develop other trades to supplement their incomes. Tenants who became tanners took advantage of local cattle herds, plentiful local water and extensive oak woods, which yielded bark to make tannin, the essential ingredient for making leather.

Little physical evidence of the Wrotham tanneries survives. Their existence, and that of the tanners who worked them in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has been pieced together from documentary sources most of which were found in the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone. The working tanners appeared in the records of the manorial courts of Wrotham held every three weeks and in the hundred courts held at Wrotham twice yearly.1 Three surveys and rentals of the manor dating from 1495, 1538 and 1568 describe all the tenant-holdings on the manor in some detail.² Where these dates occur below they refer to these rentals and surveys. The locations of the tanyards were confirmed by walking the ground and viewing the water-courses. Except where footnoted, all dates other than the rental dates above refer to the court rolls. Sixteenth-century place-names are given in italics.

Leather was universally used in earlier times. It was an essential part of daily life in the form of clothing, shoes, animal harness, saddles and containers for goods, liquids and weapons. Local traders supplied these everyday needs to those who lived and worked on the manor. John Beeche of Stansted was one of them. In 1583 he sued a recently re-married widow, Cecilia Penystone, for a debt of 10s. 11d. for goods she had received from him before her marriage. John pleaded that Cecilia, when she was single, on 10 June 1576, bought from him half a hide of white leather for 2s. 6d., 2 belts called ‘girts’ for 10d., two leather ‘pypes’ for 8d., a halter for 6d., 3 collar halters for 2s., a bit for 2½d., a yard of linen cloth called canvas for 6½d., 1 white leather for 20d., all part of the aforesaid 10s. 11d. Five of the seven items required by this soon-to-be-married matron were of leather.

The local market would have absorbed much of the output of the Wrotham tanners. In 1495 the minimum population of the manor is estimated to have been 212 households, perhaps 1,060 men, women and children.³ This market was satisfied by two or three tanners working at the same time but how big the tanneries were is unknown.

The tanners of Wrotham attended the hundred court which was held twice a year at Wrotham. This was the court which applied national legislation in regard to trades and crafts and it was here that the tradesmen of the manor presented themselves to have their names inscribed on the court rolls, borough by borough, as craftsmen practising a trade. The wording of some entries implies instances of malpractice on the part of the tradesman to justify a fine. A typical entry reads: ‘the jurors say that John Colyn is a tanner who takes advantage of his art against the terms of the statute. Therefore he is in mercy – 3d’. In the fifteenth century fines were of 2d., 3d. or 4d. By the second half of the sixteenth century Tudor inflation had pushed the usual fine to 6d., with some of 8d. or even a shilling. The fines are often the only evidence as to who was a tanner and in which borough. As the same formula was used year after year, it is clear that generally the fines imposed on tanners were in the nature of licences to work. The size of the fine was probably related to the size of the business and its prosperity. From 1463 to 1472 John Colyn of Roughway paid four 2d. fines and one 3d. fine. In the three years 1473-75 he appears as John Colyn ‘senior’ paying 4d. a year. He presumably died that year because in 1475/6 plain John Colyn, his son, paid a fine of 2d. The business must have contracted following the death of John Colyn (snr). The fine assessment would depend on the local knowledge of the affeerors, or assessors, who were elected by the court jurors. The fines were paid to the lord of the manor and were one of his sources of revenue. Sadly, the records of fines do not provide details of the tanner’s employees. In Wrotham, tanneries were probably small family affairs with sons following fathers into the trade with few servants being employed.

Regulation of the Tanning Industry

The earliest acts relating to tanning were from the time of Richard II.⁴ Legislation of Henry VI in 1422 sought to prevent the defective tanning of hides.⁵ There were later confirmations and additions by Henry VII, Elizabeth and James I, ordering the separation of the various leather trades. A tanner was not to be also a currier, leather cutter or shoemaker. Acts of Elizabeth and James I forbade tanners to be butchers or butchers to be tanners.⁶

There was also a division between the tanned hides of the tanners and the lighter, softer leather of the tawyers. The tanners produced ‘red’ leather from hides soaked in tannin solution. The tawyers preserved the skins of almost every other type of animal using alum, egg yolks, oil and flour to produce white leather – hence their name of whit-tawyers.

In 1509 tanners were forbidden to tan sheepskin, which was the province of the tawyers, and tanners were only allowed to sell ‘red’ leather.⁷ Throughout the sixteenth century there were acts forbidding the export of leather, and regulations about when and where leather could be sold. In 1532 Leadenhall Market was declared to be the market for leather in London with a system of searchers and the sealing of hides to denote their quality.⁸ For every 10 hides certified searchers were to receive one penny. The penalty for marking hides improperly or for trading in unmarked leather was 3s. 4d. Outside London, ‘hedd officers’ in ‘markett townes’ were to appoint two or more persons of the ‘best skylled men’ to search and view within the towns once a quarter, with a mark or seal for leather which is ‘sufficyent’. Failure to appoint these men carried a penalty of £20. Nevertheless, leather inspectors did not operate in Wrotham until 1578 when Walter Skynner and Thomas Burge were appointed and started earning their pennies. How Skynner and Burge came to be qualified searchers is unclear. Walter Skynner was an alehouse keeper in Wrotham all his life. Nothing else is known about Burge. Perhaps Burge knew the technicalities of the job and Skynner knew the people.

The inspectors set to work immediately. In 1578 Robert Bryght of Wrotham and Richard West of Roughway together curried ‘a backe of sole leather’ and sold it before the inspectors had sealed it.⁹ They were each fined 6d. In the same year Edward Rootes and Robert Barrett of neighbouring Ightham, leather workers, were both found guilty of dressing and selling ‘a foote of backe leather’ against the terms of the statute and of selling it unsealed. Robert did the same thing two years later and was fined 2d. In 1582 Henry Welshe, tanner of Winfield, sold Edward Rootes crude leather ‘rawhides’ before they received the seal of approval and which were judged to be insufficiently tanned. Welshe was fined the full penalty of 3s. 4d. and Rootes was fined 12d.

Butchers also appeared in the hundred courts paying fines. In 1499 they outnumbered the tanners by six to one. The entry for three of them reads: ‘the jurors present that Richard Cooke (3d), Richard Chowne (2d), John Curde (2d) are butchers outside the borough, therefore they are in mercy 7d’. All three lived in the borough of Hale in houses that still exist, so ‘outside the borough’ must refer to where they traded. These butchers would be recognised today as ‘butchers and graziers’; they were not just killing beasts for the local shop but also for the London meat market. Herds were driven up to London from all parts of the country for slaughter, furnishing the numerous tanyards there with skins. Surplus skins were then transported back to tanning centres in the countryside. However, the Wrotham tanyards must have been adequately supplied from local slaughter and hides from London would have been sent to centres like Faversham or Maidstone using water transport.¹⁰

The Butchers and Graziers of Wrotham

Local livestock was as important a resource for tanners as running water and oak bark. The two southern boroughs of Roughway and Hale were on the edge of the Weald which was renowned for cattle raising in its oak woodland pastures. The butchers of Wrotham were well placed to exploit this cattle economy. The Cookes were lessees of the manor of Shipbourne in the Weald, south of Wrotham manor, as well as running their Hale property around Ashenden. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Chowne family built up a huge estate in Wrotham and the surrounding area based on Fairlawne in Hale. This stands on the manor’s southern boundary overlooking Shipbourne and the Weald (and is still a stately home). The Curdes prospered too, moving from Marshalls (Jordans) to Nut Tree Hall, where they rebuilt the hall.

These butchers and graziers kept the London trade moving through the manor on its way to London, growing richer year by year as the City grew. An area of common land in Plaxtol beside the River Bourne between The Spoute and Long Mill was known as Cowherds Plain. It was presumably an overnight stop on the drovers’ journey to London from the Weald.

In addition to the London herds, the fields of Wrotham manor were grazed by the usual farm animals. Inventories of possessions are lacking for Wrotham in this period but there are clues in wills, court rolls and accounts. For example, John Colyn, tanner, who died in 1491, left two heifers to two godsons and two cows to his wife.¹¹ John Curde who died in 1577 left two lambs to two godchildren and a two year old bullock to a godson.¹² We learn from the will of William Hampton, pouchmaker, in 1492, that milking cows existed in Roughway.¹³ When a tenant’s death was recorded in the court rolls, a death duty (heriot) was exacted. Richard Myller’s heriot in 1530 was an ox valued at 17s. which was to be delivered to the lord’s guest house. John Lane, a smith, died in 1522 and a heriot of a grey horse was paid valued at 20s. A ewe worth 2s. was paid in 1519 when Thomas Hobyll died. Horses and oxen were sometimes pastured for a fee in the Wrotham deer parks and they appear in the parker’s accounts. The hides of any cattle and sometimes horses, would go to the tanner. Skins of sheep, goat, deer, horse and hound would go to the tawyer. Wrotham had tawyers working on the manor from time to time, in Winfield in the 1450s and in Wrotham in the 1560s.

The Leathermaking Process

The tanning process was much the same wherever in the country it was practised. The preservative, from which the trade took its name, was tannin, found in oak bark. This was ground to a powder in bark mills and added to the water-filled pits in which the hides were soaking. Although bark was easily available on the manor and bark stripping must have been done, there is no information in any Wrotham documents about the bark trade.

Tannin was not the only chemical required to tan hides. Urine, wood-ash and lime were used to free the skins of hair. Then the skins were washed in a solution of bird droppings or dog dung, which removed the lime. Another method of removing lime was to treat the hides with fermenting barley or rye with the addition of stale beer or urine. These initial processes polluted the rivers beside which they took place and polluted the air with chemicals. Tanneries made unpleasant neighbours and the people of Wrotham town were fortunate that the tanners found their sites in the countryside.

Tanners received cattle hides from the butchers, still with horns and hooves attached. The hides had to be trimmed and cleaned of blood and meat. They were pegged out on the ground and the tanners’ dogs did the preliminary clean with their teeth. Tanners’ dogs were on the staff of every tanyard. Plate I shows a tanner’s dog sitting closely watching his master (in a window given by the tanners’ guild to Bourges Cathedral).

After this initial clean, the hides were washed, in running water if possible. Unhairing and fleshing were the next processes. The hides were soaked in a weak mixture of slaked lime and water, to loosen any fat and flesh still attached to the skin. Then the hide was flung over a convex metal working surface called a beam and scraped on both sides to remove hair and anything else still adhering. The tanner in the Bourges window is working on a beam. His dog is hoping for scraps.

Then the hides were divided up into the different qualities of hide and handled daily in pits of mild tannin solution. When the colour of the skins was even they were moved into layaway pits where they remained immersed for about a year. They were then rinsed off, smoothed and dried slowly in drying sheds.

A tanner needed running water, a piece of ground big enough to accommodate however many pits he needed and sheds for drying. He also needed capital, as the time between buying the hide from the butcher and selling leather to a customer was at least one year. Michael Zell suggests that a tanner needed capital of £50 to £100 to invest in raw materials and equipment.¹⁴ Tanners’ inventories from other places showed that few of them were poor. Unfortunately, no fifteenth/sixteenth-century tanners’ inventories have survived for Wrotham. The earliest that has survived is for Benjamin Austin of Plaxtol who died in 1664.¹⁵ He was not a wealthy man. The total value of his goods was 81s. 10d. of which more than three-quarters concerned stock in trade:

In the tannyard as much

Leather dry and green as is worth 33s. 11d.

Item Backe to tann withal

Valued at 32s.

Item the working tools 5d.

More prosperous was James Godden of Basted who, in 1710, left an inventory of which the total value was £227 12s. 6d.¹⁶ More than half the value was in the tanyard:

Item eleaven dicker of backs hides, thirteen skins,

twenty load of tann and some other lumber £129 12s. 6d.

Ten hides made a dicker. Two hop gardens and old hop poles valued at £36 show that tanning was not his sole source of income.

From the tanner the rough cured skins went to the currier. Again, this was a separate trade. The currier had a workshop where the skins were treated to make them pliable and suitable for whatever end-product was desired. They were impregnated with tallow and oil and then sorted out into hard and soft leathers. The men fined by the leather inspectors, Bryght, West, Rootes and Barrett (see above) were curriers.

Curried hides were sold to the leather finishing trades, which had their own rules and regulations such as the following for cordwainers (shoemakers):

And be it further enacted…that noe persone occupying the seat or mysterie of a Corriar, Cordewayner, Cobler, Sadler, Gordler, Letherseller, Bottelmaker or any other artificer…shall sell tanned hides after Michaelmas unwroughte [i.e. not processed]. No…cordewayners after Michaelmas to make Boots, Shoes, Startoppes¹⁷ or Slyppers of leather [unless] of good…tanned leather well and truly corryed after this rate and sorte That is to wyte, wette Lether as that which sholde holde out wete, and dry lether as it behoveth such to be; Cordewayners…shall pout in the inner soule of the saide double soled Shoes, Bootes, Startoppes and Slyppers leather called the Wombe, well and sufficiently corried, and in the Treswelles of the doble soled Shoes the flanke of the hyde or skynne sufficiently corried.¹⁸

Leather made from the womb of an animal was presumably naturally waterproof. Treswelles is a term for a double-soled shoe. Such detailed specifications suggest widespread abuses in both leather and shoe-making.

Wrotham manor had no tanners in Wrotham town itself and there is no evidence that tanning went on in Stansted either. The working tanners were spread over four localities at Nepicar Street, Basted, Plaxtol Street and Roughway Street. Basted was the least active site but the others all ran concurrently. The tannery at Nepicar was the local source of leather for Wrotham town being just over a mile to the east along the road to Maidstone.

The tanners of Nepicar and the Wybarne family

There was a tannery at Nepicar as early as 1334 and probably long before that. In the tax assessment for Wrotham for that year the fourth name in the list is ‘Lambert Tanner’ assessed at 3s.¹⁹ ‘Tanner’ looks like a surname which at this late date is not necessarily the same as one’s occupation. But in the return for 1337 the fourth name in the list of tax payers, assessed at 16d., is quite explicitly ‘Henry Lambert, tanner’. The name above his is Thomas Wybarne assessed at 12d.²⁰ With the subsequent Wybarne history it can be assumed that Henry and Thomas were colleagues in a tanning business. They were in the lower tax-paying ranks, the range of assessments being from 8d. to 34s. We can also assume that in the fourteenth century the premises were located in Nepicar as the sixth and seventh names in the list of taxpayers are William Nepaker and Henry Nepaker, neighbours.

The court rolls of 1409 for Wrotham refer to tanners in Nepicar borough called John Wybarn and Walter Clerk, paying fines of 3d. each. At the same court Robert Kyff, the butcher from Nepicar, was fined 2d. and continued to pay butcher’s fines until 1441. He probably supplied hides to Wybarn and Clerk. The Kyff family had a shop in Wrotham market place where meat or leather might well have been sold.

The Wybarne property lay around Kyngescrouche.²¹ It was called Wybarnes and had a dovecot, an amenity usually associated with manor houses. The landholding was of 47 acres and the rent paid throughout the three rentals was consistently close to 9s. This was well above average for Wrotham manor and made Wybarnes a viable agricultural unit, independent of a tannery. It is reasonable to suppose that the profits from cultivating Wybarnes would yield the capital necessary to run the tannery.

Springs and streams surround Wybarnes so there was plenty of water for washing the hides and filling the tanning pits. There are two ponds on the property today. To the west of Wybarnes there was more running water at Bitmontssole on Nepicar Street (‘sole’ means a muddy place). The rentals reveal no field names associated with tanning on the holding. We have to wait for the Wrotham tithe map of 1840 to discover that the small 1½ acre field to the north of Wybarnes was a hopfield called Little Tanners. The tithe map shows no other field names associated with tanning.

In the court rolls various Wybarnes were paying fines for tanning from 1409. In 1410 John Wybarne was fined 2d., Walter Clerk 3d. and John Smyth 2d. as tanners of Nepicar. John Smyth was fined another 2d. for encroaching on the highway at Kyngescrouche. He was ordered to make repairs before the next court on pain of a fine of 13s. 4d.: a large sum. Walter Clerk had placed his workshop on the street and was fined 12d. He was ordered to remove it before the next court on pain of an even heavier fine of 20s. He had also placed his leather on the common way at Kyngescrouche creating a nuisance. He was threatened with a fine of 4s. for future offences. To add insult to injury he had also obstructed the highway at Kyngescrouche with his dungheap. Apart from offending their neighbours, Nepicar Street, on which Kyngescrouche lay, was the main London to Maidstone road.

The Wybarne family continued to tan in Nepicar until 1478. John Wybarne, ‘tanner’, appears in a list of people summoned to the inquiry into Hasilden’s rebellion in 1451.²² Also tanning in the borough between 1441 and 1476 were Cornelius and Daniel Grenehyll, Peter Yonge, John Wybarne (jnr), Thomas Wybarne and Richard Wellis.²³ In 1486 Christian Hilder, another Nepicar man, paid a tanning fine of 3d.

Richard Wybarne acquired his father John’s 47 acres in 1480 and is the landholder on the rental of 1495. He appeared in the court rolls five times between 1497 and 1522 but never as a tanner. He may have leased off the tannery to other operators and devoted himself to agriculture. A Richard Baker of Nepicar is fined for being a tanner of red leather in 1505, 1506, 1513 and 1515 and could well have been the lessee. This must be the same Richard Baker, tanner, of the borough of Oxenhoath, West Peckham, who died in 1540.²⁴

Thereafter no tanning fines were paid in Nepicar between 1515 and 1564 although the Wybarnes were in possession of the Wybarnes holding throughout. Richard Wybarne’s son John is the tenant on the 1538 rental. He is referred to as ‘John Wybarne of Kemsing’ so may have been holding land and leading his life elsewhere. But he does take some part in Wrotham local life. In 1537 he is one of the grand jury of the manorial court and again in 1547.

The only tanning fines recorded in this period are in Ightham for John Bownd, John Gull and John Barr who paid 4d. fines in 1542 and 1549. The fact that these and no others were recorded at the hundred court supports the possibility that tanning had ceased elsewhere in the hundred at this time.

Richard Wybarne, son of John Wybarne of Kemsing, was a tanner in Nepicar from 1564 to 1583 when he died. In 1584 Agnes Wybarne, his widow, paid the fine for tanning. Their son, yet another John, aged 17, carried on thereafter till 1589 when Hugh Bowerman took over until 1593. In 1588 John Wybarne had been excused from attendance at the hundred court as he was absent ‘in service of our lady Queen’. As a fit young man of 20 he was probably serving with the militia through the year of the Spanish Armada. It is rare for Wrotham manorial records to give a hint of national events. John Wybarne never paid another tanning fine and Hugh Bowerman seems to have taken his place. Nevertheless, the Wybarnes continued tanning into the seventeenth century. A Tonbridge will of 1613 appoints ‘John Wybourne of Wrotham, tanner, …to be my overseer’.²⁵

Bitmontssole to the west of Wybarnes may have been another tanyard or leather working area. In 1497 the manorial court recorded the death of one John Goodwyn, whose landholding lay opposite Bitmontssole on the south side of the road near Wybarnes. The post mortem account of his holding included a piece of land called a ‘hydyerd’, which lay adjacent to his property. It had been bought from John Wellis, perhaps the son of the Richard Wellis, tanner, mentioned above. John Goodwyn had ‘a shop at the Churchgate’ in Wrotham. If he were dealing in leather this could have been one of his outlets.

John Goodwyn and the Wybarnes did not confine themselves to Nepicar for their activities. Both were agriculturalists on some scale in addition to their tanning activities and both had connections with Kemsing manor and its neighbour Seal, five miles west of Wrotham. John Goodwyn wrote a will which shows him to have been of yeoman status.²⁶ He left his ‘Nepaker tenement’ to his son Richard and two properties in ‘Seele and Kemsyng’ to his sons Hugh and William. ‘John Wybarne of Kemsing’ must have had property there to have been given the appellation. The modern ordnance survey map tantalisingly has the name ‘Tannerscross’ at a road junction between Seal and Kemsing.²⁷ Probate of the will was granted to Reginald Pekham, lord of the manor of Yaldham near Wrotham, so Goodwyn mingled with the local gentry.

It is difficult to assess the financial standing of these people because few wills and inventories of property have survived. A fire in the early seventeenth century destroyed most of the wills and inventories of the Deanery of Shoreham to which Wrotham belonged. Those that do survive come from the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and deal with people owning property in more than one ecclesiastical authority as John Goodwyn did.

It is tempting to push the Goodwyn family tanning connection forward to 1573 when Anthony and Thomas Godden of Nepicar were fined 6d. for tanning. Godden is an alternative form of the name Goodwyn. If we move on another century, Goddens are found tanning at Basted in Winfield in the late seventeenth century.

The Tanners of Winfield

The earliest reference to tanning in Winfield borough is in the court rolls in 1410 when Richard Tamde paid his 2d. tanner’s fine and in addition was fined for leaving his worked leather in the highway near the River Bourne. In the same year he also paid 3d. for working as a miller. In 1411 he paid a 2d. fine as a butcher, thus providing a good source of hides for his alter ego Richard Tamde the tanner. This was before legislation separated the two trades.

In the same years John Lorans was working in Winfield as a whit-tawyer. There is then a gap in the court rolls until April 1433 when his death is reported. In September 1433 a John Lorans paid a 2d. fine as a whit-tawyer, presumably the son of the first John Lorans. One can reasonably presume that whit-tawing continued through the years of the missing court rolls.

The tannery may have continued as a locally known site into the sixteenth century because in the rental of 1495 a property called Tanners existed west of Basted mill:

John Bayle holds in right of his wife a messuage and garden called ‘Tanners’ lying opposite Barstidismill, the highway to the north and east. He owes 2d rent.

There is no evidence that Bayle himself was a tanner or employed one. John Bayle was the tithing man of Wrotham in 1499, constable in 1511 and made many appearances in the court rolls, buying and selling property, appearing as attorney in debt cases, brewing and holding the office of reeve and beadle. He died around 1520. By 1568 Tannerscroft had been absorbed into a neighbouring property.

Tanning in Winfield seems to have ceased from the mid fifteenth century until 1580 when a Henry Welshe paid his fines for tanning from 1580-88.²⁸ The location of his tannery was probably the same as the tannery occupied by Thomas Godden in 1652, half a mile downstream from the mill.²⁹ The site was owned by Sir Nicholas Miller, the wealthiest man of the manor. The Goddens made money, too; James Godden died in 1710 leaving bequests totalling £187 3s.³⁰

The Tanners of Hale

The Basted site was ideal for tanning with its running water and isolated position. But when Thomas Derman moved from Borough Green to set up a tannery at Tebolds in Hale in 1566, the convenience of the public cannot have been uppermost in his mind. The site was among other dwellings in the village street and consisted of two cottages and one decayed cottage on four acres of land at a rent of 15d. The water supply was a spring and a public well. To his advantage, the tenant next door at Pennyhall, Thomas Harries, was a butcher. Derman tanned here for twenty-six years. In addition to Tebolds he held two detached parcels of land of seven and five acres. His total rent was 4s. 6d. which put him into the middle rank of rent payers. He may have been sub-letting land as well of which we know nothing.

From his appearances in the court rolls we can judge that he made an uncomfortable neighbour. On arrival he took away stones from around a pond ‘at Sowthstrete’. In 1568 he was ordered to replace the stones, fined 2s. and warned that a future offence would incur a fine of 3s. 4d.

Interfering with the local water supplies must have become a habit. In 1576 the court heard he had made dunghills and other fetid heaps called ‘tanwoes’ in a certain well called Stockwell to the annoyance of his neighbours, for which he was fined 12d. He was ordered not to make such a stink henceforth on pain of being fined 3s. 4d. Stockwell was probably on the site of the present day Pump Cottages and may have fed the pump, as it is described as being to the north of the Tebolds site in the rental of 1495. It may be the same source of water as the pond from which Derman removed the stones in 1568. Derman seems to have been a recalcitrant character. In 1571 Susanna Sybell, Derman’s servant, acting on his orders, broke into the park at Wrotham and took away a cow of Derman’s which had been impounded by the beadle for non-payment of fines. In the same year the Dermans’ ditch at the gates of Pennyhall was overflowing because it needed scouring. The ditch was sufficiently large to have a bridge over it. John Derman was threatened with a 3s. 4d. fine if he failed to clean it in future. In the same year William Harries was ordered to leave open a water-hole (Stockwell again?), which he unjustly enclosed at Christmas time. He too was threatened with a future fine of 3s. 4d.

The centre of Plaxtol Street in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I was not the peaceful and salubrious place it is today. Ten years later the well was still a contentious matter for the neighbours. ‘Between the house of Richard West and William Harries is a well in the Queen’s Highway polluted by Richard West’ for which he was fined 12d. with a threat of 3s. 4d. Richard West was the tanner who, with Robert Bryght, tanned a backe of sole leather at Wrotham and sold it before it had been sealed (see above). Tanning the ‘backe of sole leather’ was perhaps a piece of free enterprise on the part of a man who was an employee of Thomas Derman, as he never appears in the court rolls as a tanner in his own right. In 1585 Thomas Derman attacked John Harries (snr) and was fined 6d. The last tanning fine paid by Derman was in 1593. He died in 1602. However, the Dermans continued tanning till 1675 when the property was sold to the Godden family of Basted, who only ceased work here in 1721.³¹

The Tanners of Roughway

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Roughway was the most important tanning area on the manor. There were at least six tanneries on Roughway Street between the bridge and Lower Roughway Farm, then known as Makefeyres. Roughway Street must have been the least desirable residential address in the district because of the smells from the noxious ingredients that were used both in tanning hides and fulling cloth. Here the Dynes, Collyns and Wolfryches among others had their premises, close to the fulling mill, beside the river.

The Wolfrych family

Wolfryches had lived in the Hundred of Wrotham since at least 1334 when the lay subsidy named three of them as taxpayers.³² Their first appearance in the court rolls is in 1407, living in the borough of Roughway. John and Thomas Wolfrych paid fines for tanning in 1444, 1445, 1453 and 1454. Their property was called John Wolveryches Tanners Tenement, which included the house now called Old Allens and the tanneries at Roughway Street.³³ Tanning was carried on there from at least 1441 to 1505. Sadly, we have no inventory of goods to describe John Wolfrych’s possessions room by room, but we do have the house he built. Old Allens was built with the profits from tanning. Agriculture may have contributed something but John Wolfrych’s holding at Roughway was small, 5 acres, and we do not know if he held any land elsewhere. The house is a timber-framed, end-jetty house, which was a popular choice of design in the period from 1440-70.³⁴ There has been timber decay and repair at ground floor level but the house was well-built and much has survived the 550 years since it was erected. The two-bay hall is still open to the roof at first floor level and the tie beam and the crown post are visible just as they would have appeared to John Wolfrych. He was a tanner of yeoman status with enough capital to build a complete dwelling in the fashion of the time.

In 1474 the ‘messuage once John Wolfrych tanner’s’ was in the hands of William Hampton, a rich London merchant of the pouchmakers guild (see below). His role must have been to provide the capital and employ tanners to process the hides.

Sir William Hampton, Pouchmaker

William Hampton was an alderman of the City of London from 1462-82. He was knighted in 1471.³⁵ He first appeared in the Wrotham court rolls when he purchased the tenement of John Wolfrych, tanner, in 1474. He paid a relief or fine of 6d., which, following the custom of Wrotham, was a quarter of the annual rent of 2s. The connection between the City and Roughway was leather. Hampton was buying it to make pouches and similar goods. The tanners of Roughway were selling their tanned hides to merchants like him. One can suppose that Hampton had come to know the tanners of Roughway in the course of business and was investing in the means of production. This implies that the tanners of Roughway supplied more than the local market even before the arrival of Hampton as a proprietor in their midst and that the volume of tanned leather increased afterwards.

Five years later Hampton expanded further when he bought Terystenement in Roughway from John Terry (snr) for £18 13s. 4d.³⁶ The feoffees were John Wolfryche (jnr) and John Terry, tanner. One imagines that for the tanning families of Roughway the continuing presence of Hampton in their midst was the equivalent of having a neighbourhood bank. He died in 1492 and his will reveals him to be a very wealthy man. His bequests alone add up to £531 2s. 4d. and in addition he left unspecified lands in three parishes. His home was in the City of London in the parish of St Swithin’s. To the poor there he left £10, and 20s. for church repairs. To the poor of Wrotham he left 10s. and the same sum to the poor of Hadlow and West Peckham.

It is possible that he also had a tannery and a house in West Peckham, which is the parish and manor which abuts Roughway to the south. An area between Roughway and Oxenhoath in the parish of West Peckham is known as ‘Hamptons’. It seems likely that it got its name from association with the activities of Sir William Hampton whose name survives today in two properties; Hamptons Farmhouse and the mansion of Hamptons.

The area would have been as suitable for tanning as Roughway. The south-eastern boundary of Wrotham manor, Wrotham parish and the borough of Roughway runs along the course of the Ewell stream. Three dammed fishponds in the stream, associated with the mansion house of Hamptons, may be medieval fish ponds in origin or they may have started life as tanning pits. Hamptons Farmhouse is close by.³⁷ It is a medieval house, which has been substantially altered, although some fifteenth-century work survives in one wing. Because the house bears the pouchmaker’s name it is probable that he built it. It is significant that three footpaths meet just north of Hamptons Farmhouse. One, known as Short Street Lane, runs from the tanners’ crofts at Roughway Street east of Roughway Bridge, in a south-easterly direction towards Hamptons Farmhouse. It meets the footpath coming south from Makefeyres, (Lower Roughway Farm) another tanning property, north of Hamptons Farmhouse. At this junction it is joined by a footpath from Upper Farm known in the fifteenth century as Turks.³⁸ Here lived Robert Turke who was mentioned in Hampton’s will. If Hampton was tanning at Hamptons and staying at Hamptons farmhouse from time to time, the footpaths were a necessary means of communication for workers, business colleagues and friends.

In the early seventeenth century the name of Hamptons was given to the great house built by John Stanley, which was sited north of the junction of Park Road and Hamptons road.³⁹ This has disappeared. A new Hamptons was built in the nineteenth century, higher up the hill.⁴⁰

Not only did Hampton give his name to this piece of West Peckham but he may be the originator of the name attached to a piece of foreshore near Herne Bay. His will provided for masses to be said for his soul in the church of Herne in Kent.⁴¹ Whether he had family connections with Herne is unknown but he must have been familiar with the place. One mile west of Herne church is a beach called Hampton with a pier bearing the same name.⁴² On this beach, from the sixteenth century, there were copperas works.⁴³ The pyrites stones containing copperas were gathered from the beach and processed to produce vitriol, or sulphates of iron, used for dyes, for tanning and for dressing leather. Hampton gave his name to a district in west Kent. Could he have had copperas interests that gave his name to a beach on the Kent coast? If so, to be commemorated in two place-names makes him a London merchant of some Kentish importance.

Hampton must have had close ties with his Roughway neighbours because two of them are mentioned in his will. When Hampton bought Terystenement in 1479 one of the feoffees was John Terry (jnr), tanner. The will provided for a priest to sing masses in the parish church of Wrotham in Kent ‘for my sowle the sowles also of John Terre and Joan his wife my fader moder and all christen sowles by the space of a hole year after my decease’. This implies a relationship of some intimacy with John Terry, tanner, more than the working relationship with a fellow tradesman.

The other Roughway man mentioned was Robert Turke, who lived at Turkes, the house at the end of one of the footpaths to Hamptons Farmhouse. Robert was entrusted with overseeing a scheme of Hampton’s for improving the ‘fowle high weyes in the borough of Rowhey’. In the fifteenth century, with uncleaned ditches overflowing down the hillside, washing away the road surface and depositing mud, the ‘fowle high weyes’ mentioned in the will must have made for difficult living and travelling conditions. All the wash-down arrived eventually on the level ground of the tanners crofts beside the river. When this was combined with the detritus of tanning, with its smells and discarded animal parts, it meant that Roughway in the late fifteenth century was not the rural haven it is today.

The Collyn family

Hampton must have known the Collyn family whose tanyard lay south of Roughway bridge across the road from his own. Like the Wolfryches, their first appearance in the court rolls was in 1407. They had a long history of paying tanning fines from 1433 to 1477. John Collyn died in 1491 leaving a modest will.⁴⁴ He left to Juliana his wife, two cows, three pairs of linen sheets and a bed with leather (lodir) covers. He asked to be buried in St George’s Church, Wrotham, leaving 5s. to the high altar, 5s. for a torch in the church and 20d. for church repairs. The friars of Aylesford received 10s. The two cows for his wife were not his only livestock as he left to William and John Wylkyn, perhaps godsons, a two-year old heifer each.

John Collyn must have been more prosperous than his will implies. He may have passed on his property between 1477 when his last tanning fine was paid and 1491 when his will was proved. His heir was his son Robert who inherited all his property in Wrotham and elsewhere in Kent. The Wrotham property of Makefeyres in Roughway, which Robert held on the 1495 rental, amounted to 30 acres.⁴⁵ How much John owned elsewhere in Kent is unknown but he may have had land in the neighbouring parish of Shipbourne where many Collyns lived. In 1481 he was presented at the hundred court for uncleaned ditches at Puttenden in Shipbourne. He also held land from Old Soar manor.⁴⁶ Altogether, Robert seems to have inherited enough land to generate the capital needed to run a tannery.

In 1500 Robert Collyn and William Pelsoyte became the tenants of Fullerstenement. This fulling mill was in the meadow on the west bank of the river north of Roughway bridge. A fulling mill could be used by tanners to rehydrate dried skins or to impregnate them with oils and could thus explain Robert Collyn’s interest.⁴⁷

Robert may have had two tanyards; one at his father’s old house of Collens the other at Makefeyres itself, 700 yards away. A tree-filled depression on the western downhill side of Lower Roughway Farm may be where the tanyard stood. To the west and south of the house at Makefeyres rise two springs which form a stream running through Makefeyres’ land as far as Roughway Street. Robert used the streams within his own property, to wash hides and fill his tanning pits, before they flowed on to do the same on the tanners crofts. Today the stream is culverted beneath the meadow where the tanners’ crofts once stood. It issues into the river from a pipe north of Roughway Bridge. Tanneries certainly existed at Makefeyres in 1621 when Nicholas Myller made his will.⁴⁸ He left to Nicholas Myller, the son of his nephew, ‘also the messuage Makefers with all the Tannyards, houses, closes, gardens, orchards, lands, meadows, pastures in the occupation of Jacob Heathe’. This was followed by the bequest of Upper Farm, a neighbouring property to Makefeyres. The next bequest in the will is another ‘messuage with tanne yard, howses, gardens etc. now in occupation of Martin Heathe…. in Wrotham’. So two tanning businesses were operating in the early seventeenth century. As with Wybarnes at Nepicar, it is tempting to believe there was continuous operation at the Makefeyres site from the fifteenth century, but hard to prove in the absence of documentation.

The tanners’ crofts at Roughway Street in the sixteenth century

Sir William Hampton’s death in 1492 left three tanners working near Roughway bridge: Robert Collyn, Richard Dyne,⁴⁹ and William Godwatt. William Godwatt paid tanning fines from 1487 to 1515 and a son, John, paid a fine in 1510. He held no land on the 1495 rental but he could have been sub-letting land for which there were no records. In 1481 he was presented in court for flooded ditches near Sharpemyll. Which tanyard he was running is unknown but he seems to have been more dependent on tanning for his livelihood than Robert Collyn who paid four tanning fines between 1494 and 1500, while Godwatt paid fourteen between 1486 and 1513. Godwatt could have been running Hampton’s tanyard at Wolveryches tenement which was sold to James Bysshop in 1505.

The third tanner, Richard Dyne, was paying 8½d. rent for three crofts of land called Tanhousemeade and another piece called Les Bekys, on Roughway Street east of the bridge (Fig. 6). A rental of the manor of ‘Sore’ shows that he held lands called The Gore and Tanhowsehaugh in the same area paying a rent of 9d. with the service ‘of finding every second year in August a man’ – for harvesting presumably.⁵⁰ He owned more land in Shipbourne, revealed in his will. When he was assessed for tax in the 1524 subsidy his name appeared under Shipbourne, not Wrotham, and was assessed at £11 on goods, the second highest assessment in the borough.⁵¹ The highest was for Richard Colyn, ‘bocher’, at 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) on goods. The butcher was perhaps supplying hides to Dyne or to his Collyn relations tanning at Roughway.

Richard Dyne’s heir died before his father so that when Richard came to write his will in 1530 his lands in Shipbourne were left to his grandson, John.⁵² Richard Dyne’s plots of tan-house land had been sold in 1529 to William Kenham, ‘yoman’, of Dartford for £40 for 28 acres.⁵³ Of this, £9 was to be given to John. One of the parties to the deal was John Brette, tanner, who may have been the working tanner operating the site for Kenham.

In the 1538 rental the land was still Kenham’s but by 1568 Thomas Robynson, gentleman, was in possession of nearly all the tanning properties near Roughway bridge; Richard Dyne’s and Wolveryches-tannerstenement. Only Taborerscroft alias Tannerscroft is in the hands of John Myller.

Thomas Robynson built himself a ‘new’ messuage on 4½ acres of ground called Lowyns (Roughway Farm) opposite Makefeyres and to the north-east of the tanners’ crofts. From there, someone could supervise or work the tanneries. As a gentleman he would not be a tanner himself. His total acreage in Wrotham was 13 acres 3 rods. He was still around in 1575 when he was a suitor at the manorial court of Soar, holding land on that manor too.⁵⁴ Whether tanning actually went on at the tanners’ crofts or not under Robynson we do not know but tanners were operating in Roughway in the 1580s. Martin Hayt tanned from 1582, joined by William Homewood in 1587 and Martin Homewood in 1592 but which premises they were working is unknown.

We have the same lack of documentary evidence for tanners in the mid sixteenth century in Roughway as in the other three boroughs. Tanners are recorded at the hundred courts for 1514/1516. There is then a gap of eleven years until the next hundred court in 1527/8 at which no tanners are recorded. Between 1527 and 1547 there are 14 hundred courts in 11 separate years and no tanners are recorded. Perhaps there was a failure to record them, or maybe a serious drop in business. Or possibly the tanners migrated downriver to Hamptons in the parish of West Peckham – in the Hundred of Hoo – and were recorded there instead? It is hard to believe that tanning did not continue after William Kenham, in company with Brette the tanner, purchased Dyne’s Tanhousemead in 1529 (see above); and hard to believe that Thomas Robynson, Kenham’s successor, did not build Lowyns, in order to be near active tanning premises near Roughway mill. Yet no written records of tanners have been found from this period. We have to wait for the year 1564 for the tanners of Nepicar, Roughway, Winfield and Hale to reappear.

If the omission of tanners’ fines was because there were none to record, it could have been due to a recession in trade. There is some evidence that the population of Wrotham manor declined during the first third of the sixteenth century.⁵⁵ Plagues and sweats afflicted the country on five occasions between 1499 and 1534, being particularly bad in London from 1530-34. In 1528 tenants sent a delegation to the archbishop at Knole to beg him to ask the king for a refund of the taxation of 1524 on account of their poverty.⁵⁶ They affirmed that ‘many of thaym and specially of thayr neighbours that tarryd at home lackyd both mete and money’. In 1535 there was a disastrous harvest. Tenant numbers declined in Wrotham and presumably consumer demand for leather declined as well. This may be a possible explanation for the disappearance of tanners’ fines from the records. The population began to recover in the 1540s and 50s and the reappearance of tanners’ fines from 1564 coincides with this.

Conclusions

Leather was an essential of daily life. It was strong, flexible, hard-wearing and waterproof. It was so universally in demand that we can assume that wherever there was population, pasture for animals, running water and oak bark there were likely to be tanneries. The Wrotham manor tanneries are probably typical of others in west Kent villages. They were small family-run businesses run alongside agricultural holdings of varying sizes. The smallest recorded was 5 acres, the largest 47. The tanners were of yeoman status, able to generate the capital required to run a business with a minimum 12 month turn-round of money. Fathers handed on to sons and one tannery in the manor was in the same family for 300 years.

The tanneries were dispersed around the manor, Nepicar Street, Plaxtol Street, Basted and Roughway Street being the sites where tanning took place. The first two were dependent on springs, the last two were sited by the river and tributary streams. Roughway, with at least six tannery sites was the most active tanning area on the manor and may have been able to profit from being near Shipbourne and the Wealden butchers. Roughway and Hale also had butchers who were able to supply hides locally and who traded outside the borough, probably to London. Cowherds Plain beside the river in Plaxtol suggests that some cattle were driven from the Weald through Wrotham on their way to London.

Markets were mainly local but some of the tanners seem to have had wider interests. The three PCC wills of Goodwyn, Collyn, and Hampton reveal extra-manorial connections. In the late fifteenth century the London merchant Hampton’s involvement with Roughway tanners is an example of the growing need for capital. He bought two tanneries there and ran them for eighteen years. His importance was sufficient for his name to have been given to two houses and a small district of West Peckham and for it to have endured for 500 years. He may also be responsible for Hampton near Herne. In the late sixteenth century the tanneries were owned by rich gentlemen who leased them out. The Millers, the richest family on the manor, owned the tanyards at Basted and Makefeyres leasing them to the Goddens and Heathes.

Studies of other neighbourhoods might furnish comparative material. Excavation of known sites might also expand our knowledge. As John Cherry asserts: ‘The subject of the village tanner deserves further attention and research to assess its real extent in the Middle Ages. The absence of any excavated tanneries in medieval villages…is notable’.⁵⁷

acknowledgements

The writer would like to thank Sarah Pearson for her valuable comments, Ann Elton for references to tanning in Seal, Vanessa Dussek for help with the location of Stockwell, and the staff of the CKS who produced the documents – ever willing and helpful.

The Tanners of Wrotham Manor 1400-1600

Front matter, Volume 126

The Medieval Site at Well Wood Aylesford

Kent Archaeological Society