Farmsteads and Landscapes in Kent
Farmsteads and Landscapes in Kent
jeremy lake, bob edwards and nicola bannister
Historic farmsteads make a fundamental contribution to Kent’s landscapethrough their varied forms, use of materials and the way that they relate to the surrounding form and patterning of landscape and settlement. These variations result from agricultural and local traditions, landownership and farm size, as well as rural industries and other functions. This article summarises the results of the Kent Farmsteads and Landscapes Project,1 which aimed to develop the county’s Historic Environment Record (HER), and ensure that the contribution of farmsteads to the character of the landscape and local distinctiveness is fully taken into account. Many excellent studies have summarised the development of Kent’s houses, barns and other working buildings,2 but this is the first time that its farmsteads have been considered as a whole and examined at a county scale in rel-ationship to the historic character and development of its landscape. This article shows that, in focusing on plan form in the rapid recording of the historic character of farmsteads, their yards and spaces are as important as the buildings themselves. It takes as its starting point a definition of the farmstead as the homestead of a farm where the farmhouse and some or all of the working farm buildings are located, some farms having field barns or outfarms sited away from the main steading. They required access to routes and tracks, and working buildings were placed in relationship to yards and other areas for stacking crops and managing livestock.
Kent is distinguished by its predominantly dispersed settlement pattern of isolated farmsteads and hamlets, established by the ninth century and sometimes earlier, set in anciently-enclosed landscapes with a pastoral origin carved out of woodland and wood pasture as indicated by the place-name evidence.3 Eighty-five per cent of farmsteads recorded by the project are sited within these dispersed forms of settlement, as isolated features, in loose clusters and in scattered hamlets. This dispersed settlement is a distinctive feature of large parts of eastern and western England.4 Kent’s ‘gavelkind’ system of partible inheritance, whereby property was inherited by male co-heirs, also helped to create a form of strip field system whereby the individual partitions, managed on the whole from isolated farmsteads, were scattered through many arable fields. Fragmentation of the fields through gavelkind led to subdivisions within the large fields marked by stones and then earth banks on which hedges later developed. Everitt suggests that the elder son retained the parental manor whilst the younger sons held the pasture lands or ‘outlands’ leading to the development of more farmsteads in the Downland pastures and the Weald.5 There are significant local variations in the density of dispersed settlement. An immediate distinction can be drawn between its wood pasture landscapes, associated with the highest densities of dispersed settlement, and the rich corn-producing vales and the fertile area of north Kent between the downs and the coastal marshes where since the medieval period the largest farms and fields developed.
These local variations in landscape character and type have provided the framework for the analysis and interpretation of Kent’s farmsteads summarised in this article. They have developed in response to physical and historical factors and how individuals and communities have worked and managed the land in response to local and distant markets. In Kent the principal agricultural processes from the medieval period have been arable farming, especially in the Isle of Thanet and across the fertile loams of northern Kent, and cattle rearing and fattening, a feature of the Weald in particular and in combination with sheep in the coastal marshlands. Kent was already recognised for its fruit, vineyards and cider by the thirteenth century6 and by the seventeenth century fruit growing to supply the London market was increasing in importance. Corn has been important in northern Kent since at least the Iron Age, and the coastal trade enabled export of produce to London. Like the Thames Valley and other areas with good access to London, northern Kent experienced only minor contraction in the extent of arable in the fifteenth century7 when many other arable areas saw a shift to pastoral farming. This area was best placed for the export of agricultural produce, via the coastal ports and Watling Street.8 There were also large brewing and malting industries established along the coast by the fifteenth century.9 The London market experienced massive growth in the nineteenth century from 1.11 to 6.5 million.10 The expansion of the railway network, and of turnpike roads in the eighteenth century combined with improvements to navigation along the Medway valley, stimulated the growth of agriculture (especially hops, fruit and poultry), village-based retail and services, rural villas and other houses and market towns.11 Growth within Kent also provided a further stimulus to agricultural markets. One third of its population was urban by around 1600, and by the 1820s the population of urban exceeded those of rural areas.12 Population increased by a further 70 per cent over the nineteenth century,13 and was most marked in parts of west Kent and around the expanding coastal towns, the inland resort of Tunbridge Wells, the naval dockyards of Chatham and Sheerness, the Thames estuary and the valleys of the Medway (improved to help export corn, hops and fruit, and later with light industry) and the light industries of the Cray and Darent valleys. The growth of the railway network also encouraged the export of milk as well as perishable food stuffs such as eggs and salads, and stimulated the growth of residential development – intermixed with market gardening and horticulture – across the rural areas of west Kent as well as Sevenoaks and the London suburbs. The hop industry, which developed from the sixteenth century, reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century when 45,000 acres were under hops.14
This diverse economy insulated Kent’s farmers from the worst of the agricultural depression in the late nineteenth century.15 It also sustained a large number of small-scale market gardeners and horticulturalists, in addition to those farmers who derived their principal income from farming and required farmsteads for the housing, processing and managing of animals and harvested produce. Outlying field barns and outfarms served these farmsteads, although the former may also have served horticultural holdings which were not linked to farmsteads.
Findings of the Project
A total of 5,526 farmsteads and 2,069 outfarms and field barns were recorded from the second edition Ordnance Survey maps of around 1895, the former approximating to the number of heads of household (5,028) who gave farming as their principal occupation in the 1851 Agricultural Census.16 These maps were compiled after the last major phase of building traditional farmsteads in England, which reached its height in the ‘High Farming’ years of the 1840s-1870s. The historic form and, through comparison with modern maps, the survival of farmsteads was then captured.17 The results were then examined against landscape character and type, of particular importance in Kent being the Weald, the belt of Greensand to its north, the North Downs, intersected by the fertile valleys of the Darent, Medway and Stour, the rich loams of the area to its north (here termed the North Kent Plain)18 and the coastal marshlands. These divisions are broadly reflected in the boundaries of the National Character Areas (see Fig. 1), which have acted as a framework for this analysis and also allow help Kent to be seen in a wider regional and national context.19 Case studies took the analysis to a finer grain, against the smaller subdivisions used for Kent’s Landscape Character Assessment and its Historic Landscape Characterisation.20
Survival and date
72 per cent of farmsteads have retained some or all of their historic form as traditional groups.21 Field survey of a sample of Kent’s farmsteads in the 1990s found that the great majority (67 per cent) of surviving buildings were nineteenth-century (1800-1914) in date, and that barns were the most numerous survivals of eighteenth- (16 per cent) and seventeenth- (12 per cent) century recorded buildings, and the only recorded survivals of the remainder of pre-1600 buildings. Moreover, the mapping of change since c.1895 has shown that across a large part of Kent farmsteads have experienced higher levels of change to their historic form than other parts of England where the same methodology has been employed.22
The Weald has the highest levels of survival of traditional farmsteads while on the other hand the North Kent Plain and the coastal marshes, where the impact of large-scale arable farming has resulted in adaptation of working farmsteads and a similarly high rate of removal of field boundaries, have the lowest levels (Table 1). These levels and patterns of change result from a diversity of factors, the most important being the functional redundancy of traditional buildings, the difficulty in adapting the smaller ones in particular to the needs of modern agriculture, and the tendency for the largest and most adaptable buildings – especially barns and oasthouses – to have been converted into non-agricultural use, especially housing.23
Despite what appear from these statistics to be a very low survival of pre-nineteenth century buildings, 52 per cent of the recorded farmsteads in Kent – a high proportion by national standards – include at least one listed building, most of these (40 per cent of all recorded farmsteads) being farmhouses and most of the working buildings being barns which are of eighteenth-century or earlier date. Only 2 per cent of farmsteads have listed working farm buildings but no listed farmhouse. Strong caveats have to be built into any analysis using these lists because they are rarely based on detailed internal survey and thus reflect the evident rather than the concealed dates of buildings.24 However, it shows that by national standards Kent has a high proportion of houses and barns in particular that are evidently and substantially at least seventeenth-century in date and which may on closer inspection prove to be earlier still.25 Throughout England, it has been suggested that these areas of high survival reflect a combination of relative wealth with conditions of tenure which favoured social mobility, fostered by the dispersal of settlement in isolated farmsteads and hamlets away from tight manorial control where collective farming was integral with the running of the manor. These factors led to the building of houses, barns and other buildings that were capable of adaptation by later generations.26
The distribution map (Fig. 2) shows that the farmsteads of the Weald and central Kent have particular concentrations of seventeenth-century, or earlier, recorded buildings. The survey of Kent’s medieval houses by the RCHME found that, in rural areas, the distributions of medium-high status houses tend to reflect patterns of wealth derived from agriculture and rural industries rather than the distribution of gentry estates.27 The patterns shown in the map reflect the results of field survey and recent analysis of the 1664 Hearth Tax, which noted strong differences between a band of central Kent, which has the highest proportion of surviving fourteenth- to early sixteenth-century houses and evidence for larger seventeenth-century houses, judged by the number of recorded hearths, and the areas to either side where a strong relationship was noted between soil quality and the survival of early houses.28 The survival of high-quality early houses to the east of the Stour, for example, attests to the development of large-scale independent arable farms out of the depopulation and rental collapse of the fourteenth century,29 whilst elsewhere in this area there is extensive evidence for single-storey houses, rebuilt in brick from the later seventeenth century, that are rarely associated with farm buildings.30 A concentration of medieval houses was also noted in those areas away from manorial control where independent farmers were able to expand their enterprises and invest in buildings that have survived.31 Examples are found in the Vale of Holmesdale, within the Wealden Greensand area, where farms with recorded houses and barns of this date are located at the foot of the North Downs; and the Weald where the farms of arable farmers and wealthy butchers and graziers were able to expand their businesses away from manorial control.32 Both the Low and High Weald were marked by a high proportion of freeholders holding their own land, a fact not lost on Lambarde writing in 1570.33 Also many Wealden yeoman farmers had other sources of income in trade and industry, spreading their capital and risk. Surviving medieval houses and barns elsewhere in Kent can also relate to the outland or free yokes held by freemen which often lay in large fields around the manor and can be identified today by farm names – for example, Amage Farm, an aisled hall-house of the fifteenth century north of the village of Wye at the foot of the North Downs escarpment.34
The Weald has the highest proportion of recorded seventeenth cent-ury, and earlier, farmstead buildings.35 This is an exceptionally dense concentration in a national and regional context, strengthening the assoc-iation between early recorded buildings and the irregular and heavily-wooded hedgerows of anciently-enclosed fields that was first noted in the Hampshire pilot project and then in Sussex.36 Colonisation of the Weald continued in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at which time there was a considerable growth in population which is also reflected in the numbers of early recorded houses.37 The small farms that typified the Weald tended to have small fields, typically less than five acres in size.38 There is a higher density of farmsteads across the High Weald than in the Low Weald, which in part results from greater intensity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century improvement in the latter, resulting in the expansion of farms through the amalgamation of holdings. For example, Chalklin’s study of farms around Tonbridge shows that farm size had increased by the mid-eighteenth century, particularly on freehold farms, with the consequent loss of farmsteads serving small farms (of 20 acres or below) from the landscape.39 The result is a contrast between higher numbers of seventeenth-century, and earlier, houses in the Low Weald that have long been decoupled from agriculture, and a higher proportion of farmsteads in the High Weald with seventeenth-century, or earlier, houses and working buildings.40 Survey has revealed an even and high rate of survival of the ‘middling sort’ of houses in the Low Weald and a greater range of houses in the more socially stratified High Weald, including the large farmsteads and houses of wealthy clothiers, ironmasters and particularly farmers specialising in stock rearing.41
These patterns of early survival continue into the Greensand, whose economy was based upon flax, fruit and nuts as well as cereals and sheep.42 The varied size of its farms and fields exploited a wide variety of soils in the Greensand, ranging from heathland often enclosed in the nineteenth century to medieval wood pasture and the more fertile loams whose strip fields had been successively enclosed and reorganised from the late medieval period. The largest farms, further enlarged by the end of the nineteenth century, had been established along the foot of the North Downs. They also developed in the river valleys of the North Downs and in the fertile pocket east of Canterbury, where a wealthy class of farmers had emerged on the Cathedral Priory estates from the fifteenth century.43 The presence of clay-with-flint otherwise impeded the development of large-scale arable agriculture, in contrast to the Downlands of Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire to the west. The fertile loams between the downs and coastal marshes include some of the richest farmland in England and the largest farms in Kent, and it is probable that the perceived wealth of the Kentish yeoman farmer was largely derived from the fame of this area.44 Smaller farmsteads are concentrated in pockets of woodland such as the Blean, but otherwise it is characterised by large-scale piecemeal and regular patterns of enclosure, with a long history of the reorganisation of fields and the removal of boundaries in order to increase arable production.
Those areas with the lowest number of recorded pre nineteenth-century sites, and thus it appears most deeply affected by rebuilding in that century, are those with poorer soils and where the pre-existing building stock was least suited to new farming techniques. The coastal marshes have the lowest densities of farmsteads and of recorded seventeenth-century, and earlier, buildings. These are confined to high-status sites and areas of slightly higher ground within and along the edges of the marshes, reflecting the fact that some its extensive grazing land was farmed by wealthy butcher-graziers around edges of the marsh and beyond.45 Even during the Napoleonic Wars, when high grain prices encouraged Downland farmers to increase their arable at the expense of grazing, there appears to have been little increase in ploughland in the marshes.46 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, much of the marshland that had been used for grazing dairy cattle and fatstock since at least the sixteenth century had been drained for arable cropping.47 In Romney Marsh a higher proportion of farmsteads have also been completely rebuilt since the late nineteenth century, and have large sheds associated with them, resulting from a continuing process of farm restructuring and enlargement which struggled to adapt even this rebuilt building stock. Another area marked by a low number of recorded sites is The Lowy of Tonbridge and the North Frith Forest in west Kent, where a pattern emerged of some wealthy holdings inter-mixed with many poorer, smaller-scale farmsteads in an area of generally poorer-quality soils.
Mapping farmstead types
The mapping of the historic form or plan type of farmsteads from the second edition maps has sought to develop a consistent methodology, enabling comparison with other parts of England (Fig. 2). The results have again revealed a broad contrast between the Weald and other parts of Kent, but they have also highlighted the distinctiveness of Kent’s farmsteads as a whole. In summary, courtyard plan farmsteads (Fig. 3a) which have the working buildings focused around one or more yards are the predominant plan type, comprising 72 per cent of recorded sites in Kent, and dispersed plans (Fig. 3b) with no focal yard comprise 25 per cent of recorded sites. The remaining three per cent (Fig. 3c), are concentrated on small plots that developed within settlements and in areas of small-fields, especially within, or on the edges of, the small fragments of remaining heathland. They comprise linear farmsteads (o), where the house and working buildings are attached and in-line, or have been extended or planned with additional working buildings to make an L-shaped range (p); (q) parallel plans where the working buildings are placed opposite and parallel to the house and (r) row plans, where the working buildings are attached in-line and are concentrated in the Weald. They are far more important, and sometimes dominant, in upland and upland fringe areas of England, and around lowland moss and heaths in the west of the country. The remainder of this section will, therefore, focus on the development and variety of Kent’s courtyard and dispersed plan types in their local and national landscape context.
Courtyard plans have the working buildings arranged around one or more yards together with the farmhouse which faces or is set gable end into the yard, or detached and set away from the working spaces of the farmstead. The courtyard plans subdivide into two groups:
loose courtyard farmsteads, the predominant plan type in south-east England, have detached buildings loosely arranged around one or more sides of a yard (a-d on Fig. 3a). Analysis against the types of historic field enclosures identified in Kent’s Historic Landscape Characterisation shows that they typically developed in relationship to fields that reflect the gradual or piecemeal enclosure from medieval open fields, woodland, Downland and heathland. In Kent, the smallest of these loose courtyard plans (with buildings to one or two sides of the yard) are now concentrated in the Weald and the largest in the North Downs, the North Kent Plain and along the edge of the Thames Estuary. A significant number of the largest-scale examples have medieval buildings associated with them, and are strongly associated with rectilinear fields which suggest successive reorganisation of the landscapes around them.48 Where loose courtyard farmsteads occur in areas of reclaimed marshland, they occur predominantly in the more irregular and smaller enclosures.
regular courtyard groups which are characterised by linked ranges of buildings. They are mostly of nineteenth-century date and display greater uniformity in the use of materials and constructional detail, often employing more non-local materials like Welsh slate, than other farmstead types. They range from L-shaped (e) to U-shaped (f) and the other larger-scale plans on Fig. 3a, which are strongly associated with landscapes of reorganised or planned enclosure, especially in the improved heathlands of the western part of the High and Low Weald. Multi-yard plans (j on Fig. 3a), which are typically the largest in scale, are concentrated along the foot of the downs in the Wealden Greensand, in the North Downs, North Kent Plain and Thames Estuary. L-plans with additional detached buildings to the third or fourth sides (k on Fig. 3a) are generally medium to large in scale and have the same pattern of distribution as the regular multi-yard plans. These large scale plan types (f-k) are strongly associated with regular fields with straight boundaries, created in a single phase or as a result of successive episodes of reorganisation including late nineteenth- and twentieth-century boundary removal. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries houses could be rebuilt to face away from the group into their own driveways and gardens, marking the (actual or aspirant) prestige of the owner or tenant.49 Regular courtyard plan types, which are associated with a higher degree of reorganisation and rationalisation, tend to have a higher proportion of sites where the farmhouse is detached than loose courtyard types.50
Dispersed plans are concentrated in the Weald and especially in those landscapes of irregular and often small-scale fields, including those cleared from woodland and coastal marsh. A distinguishing feature of all dispersed plans is the seemingly random arrangement of buildings within a single farmstead boundary, which is usually irregular in shape. They subdivide into:
dispersed clusters (l on Fig. 3b), where the working buildings are loc-ated within the boundary of the steading;
dispersed driftways (m on Fig. 3b) which are grouped around route-ways for moving livestock and are almost all concentrated in the Weald.
dispersed multi-yards, which are often large-scale farmsteads contain-ing two or more detached yards (n on Fig. 3b)
A pattern language
The mix and distribution of dispersed and courtyard plan farmsteads indicate the distinctiveness of Kent as a whole and marked differences between the Weald and other areas within the county. The Weald has a strong pattern of smaller courtyard farmsteads and dispersed-plan farmsteads. It also has a low but notable distribution of regular covered yards and some of the large-scale regular courtyard plans, especially in areas of former heathland improved for arable farming from the late eighteenth century. North of the Weald there are some dispersed and small-scale courtyard plans, but here the far higher concentration of the largest courtyard-plan farmsteads indicates the dominance of large-scale and arable-based farming enterprises, with local variations in the numbers of smaller farms (Table 2).
This diversity reflects differences in the siting of buildings and spaces for those functions that shaped the development of historic farmsteads – to house the farming family and any workers, store and process the harvested corn crop, fruit and hops, shelter farm vehicles and implements, shelter farm animals, and keep their manure for returning to the fields around them (Figs 4a and 4b). The largest traditional buildings are barns for storing and processing the grain crop. Large early barns, often aisled and sometimes two or even three to a farmstead, were a feature of the corn-producing areas. Examples of aisled barns dating up to the early nineteenth century are concentrated in the corn-growing areas of east Kent and in the coastal fringe, avoiding the pastoral farmlands of the Weald where three-bay and five-bay unaisled barns are standard.51 Oasts for storing and drying hops were mostly rebuilt to an industrial scale in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes retaining earlier timber-framed cores. Other buildings, or parts of multi-functional ranges, were built to store grain and house horses, carts and implements for working the land, and specialist buildings such as pigsties, dairies and dovecotes can also be encountered on farmsteads. Buildings for housing cattle – primarily shelter sheds, loose boxes and cow houses – usually faced into yards from which manure was taken to fertilise the fields. Manure production was especially important on farms with hop gardens as hops need fertile soils; the oast house is a specialised processing building for hops which were rarely stored on the farm for long periods. Single or multiple yards for containing livestock are thus of fundamental importance in shaping the historic character of farmsteads as seen in their plan form. Other open and enclosed spaces within and around the farmstead were used to stack crops and move animals and vehicles. They can range from spaces that are fully or partially enclosed by buildings to more open areas that serve to link the outer edges of the farmstead to its surrounding landscape.
Within the pre-1600 farmsteads group the generally high percentage of the dispersed plan types suggests that they are mostly of early origin (Fig. 5). Across the West Midlands, Hampshire, Sussex and Kent, where farmsteads have been mapped to the same methodology, dispersed plan farmsteads are either associated with recorded buildings of this date and assarted fields within wood pasture landscapes or with later, heathland fringe development by small-scale farmers often encroaching into areas of common. This form of dispersed plan farmstead development can be seen in small areas within Kent, for example, around Lenham Heath (see case study, below).52 When the distribution of dispersed cluster plans is seen in a south-eastern context they emerge as a highly distinctive element of Kent’s rural landscape, particularly within the small irregular fields created through the piecemeal clearance of woodland, suggesting that they represent a cultural tradition of farmstead development. It is not just the irregularity of dispersed plans that set them apart from the majority of farmsteads in lowland England; they are often located on routeways and at nodal points in the network of roads, tracks and paths. These have indeed been best retained within the assarted landscapes of the Low and High Weald, but within Romney Marsh, where 23.9 per cent of farmsteads within the National Character Area were of this type, they were also typically associated with small, irregular enclosures which are mostly of medieval origin. However, not only is there a greater proportion of dispersed cluster farmsteads in the Weald compared with the rest of Kent, but also the larger examples of this plan type are generally found there. The majority of examples in the northern part of the county consist of one to three buildings which are often relatively small in scale. Although small-scale examples are found in the Weald they are inter-mixed with larger examples. This results from a variety of factors particular to the Weald, including the striking variability of the soils within relatively short distances which promoted variations in farm size and the intermittent cropping of farmland on poorer soils.53 The numerous valley meadows meant that both grass and hay was available for feeding cattle, with stock being confined to farmsteads during the winter due to the impossible conditions of the clay. Straw from the corn crop, often grown for fodder rather than for sale as a cash crop in the Weald, was supplemented by bracken for bedding which could be easily gathered in from the surrounding landscape and eventually made into manure.
The tradition of fattening stock in the Weald on hay, bracken and leaves goes back to before the thirteenth century, when stock (mainly pigs but also cattle) were seasonally driven along established tracks into the woodland to feed on the oak mast (and beech on the Chart Hills).54 Farmers in the Weald were managing not only farmland but also woodland, timber being exported from the area as well as coppiced for fuel in the iron and later hop industries55 and in some cases heathland in an integrated system based on livestock. Dispersed cluster plan farmsteads of different scales could thus have developed as multi-functional working areas, capable of being modified to allow for changes in farming and woodland management. The expansion or reorganisation of different buildings and working areas cold thus have adjusted to the diversity and flexibility of Wealden farming which despite a marked increase in arable production from the late eighteenth century remained a key feature of the Weald into the twentieth century.56 Investigation in the Weald has indeed shown that many pre-nineteenth century barns were multi-functional, and in some cases were subdivided in order to house cattle, horses and their fodder, prior to their conversion from the late eighteenth century into barns for threshing and storing the grain crop: this entailed the removal of their internal partitions and of livestock to their own buildings.57
These distinctions are further strengthened when we examine the multi-yard farmsteads which are a distinctive feature of Kent as a whole. Their strong association with seventeenth-century, and earlier, buildings suggests a long historical development (Fig. 5). Their scale and complexity also suggests a need for more labour-intensive yard management, also noted from the 1851 census in Kent’s high ratio of male farm workers per farmer (9.2:1).58 However, the marked difference in the distribution of the dispersed and regular plan types is so strong that it both serves to emphasise the distinct identity of the Weald, and question whether the reg-ular types represent the reorganisation of an archaic and formerly more widespread form. The concentration of dispersed multi-yard farmsteads in the Weald suggests an association with the rearing and fattening of livestock, the various yards being used to separate stock. Regular multi-yards are in contrast associated with the corn-producing parts of the county, where other large-scale courtyard farmsteads developed, and with high-status large-scale farmsteads in the Weald (Fig. 5). Here the fields were historically large, a common theme being their successive reordering and enlargement into predominantly regular patterns of enclosure which may have retained traces of earlier boundaries. This arable farming placed different requirements on farm-stead planning, as straw from the corn crop threshed in the barn was taken to be trodden down into manure in cattle yards and associated cattle housing and stabling. They are also associated with high status farmsteads built close to a church – often called Court (Lodge) Farms in Kent.59 Surviving examples, including the ‘parent’ manor farms which developed next to churches, include the court lodge farms at Godmersham, Brook and Appledore which belonged to Christ Church Priory at Canterbury.60 Of the recorded farmsteads incorporating ‘Court’ as part of their name, by far the greatest proportion, 27 per cent, were of regular multi-yard plan type.
parish case studies
Five parishes across Kent were selected to examine how more detailed mapping of farmsteads can be achieved through recording the plan form shown on the tithe maps and assessing the degree of change that was seen between c.1840 and the end of the nineteenth century. Two parishes, Cliffe and Higham, on the Hoo Peninsula were chosen to contribute to a wider historic environment project being undertaken by English Heritage.61 Lenham represents a large parish that straddles the boundary between the North Downs and the Greensand, whilst Goudhurst in the High Weald and Wittersham in the western part of the Romney Marsh were selected as the tithe map and the 1915 Land Tax mapping was made available in digital form by the High Weald AONB Unit.
Cliffe and Higham
The results of the farmsteads mapping, both for the county and the parishes of neighbouring Higham and Cliffe, contributed towards a detailed historic landscape characterisation of the Hoo Peninsula, undertaken as part of a detailed project focusing on the area.62 The present historic landscape character of these parishes is dominated by enclosures; to the north and west are the salt marsh innings along the Thames estuary, whilst inland on the higher ground are field enclosures dominated by those which have undergone modern field amalgamation. This is particularly true of Higham. All these fields, however, are not necessarily the result of modern field boundary loss, but may be the consequence of earlier field rationalisation in the nineteenth century which went hand-in-hand with the transformation of its farmsteads.63 By the end of the century loose courtyards and regular courtyards were equal in number, a result of both the replacement of dispersed by courtyard plans and also the expansion of courtyard plans with new separate or interlinked buildings.64 Almost all the large, high status farms in Higham were of regular courtyard form by the end of the nineteenth century, and in both parishes the largest and most prestigious farms had developed into regular multi-yard plans.
The survival of early buildings in the Hoo is markedly lower than in most of Kent, and also there are significant differences with respect to the dating and distribution of farmsteads in relationship to the enclosure of open fields. Those farmsteads with a medieval farmhouse within the parish of Cliffe are concentrated within the village and adjacent to an area of formal planned fields. These fields are enclosed from areas of once open fields, mentioned by Hasted in 1797,65 around which the farmsteads are located. The terms ‘open fields’ and ‘strip fields’ used in the Hoo HLC are indicative of fields worked as part of a collaborative exercise from villages and more commonly hamlets and isolated farmsteads, rather than in the communal way typical of the Midlands system of medieval open fields worked from villages. There is a notable ring of farms which seem to define the eastern and southern limits of the open fields, three of which (Berrycourt, Carden and Mortimer) were of manorial status. To the west, Buckland Farm, which is dated by two seventeenth-century buildings, probably marks the western limit of the open fields. Scattered across the salt marsh innings are outfarms and field barns which date to the nineteenth century. In the parish of Cliffe they appear to form a line which coincides with the extent of innings which were relatively secure from seasonal flooding.
The farmsteads with a surviving medieval farmhouse in the parish of Higham occur at the hamlet of Lower Higham and also on isolated farmsteads such as Whitehouse Farm. The tithe map shows that there were still areas of the former open fields that were sub-divided but largely unenclosed, although large parts of these fields could be in a single ownership. The majority of the fields to the east and south of Whitehouse Farm (then called Brick House Farm) belonged to it, but further to the south there were a series of smaller blocks belonging to several different farmers, suggesting that there had been considerable consolidation of strips, but the process was not complete. Whitehouse Farm is one of three farms shown in the tithe apportionments as being over 300 acres in extent. There was one farm of between 200-300 acres and two of 100-200 acres. The remaining holdings were generally between c.20 and 50 acres. It is in these areas of field rationalisation that many of the single outbarns with nineteenth-century buildings occur, suggesting a farming system that required storage facilities out in the fields and away from the main farmstead.
Emerging from the analysis of farmsteads against historic fieldscapes is a picture of remarkable stability. Farmsteads continued to work fields from existing sites, in contrast to those areas of the country where farmsteads were located in newly-enclosed fields and the recorded dates of their buildings provides a terminus ante quem for the date of en-closure.
Lenham
The historic market centre of Lenham lies on the spring line at the foot of the chalk scarp of the North Downs on the main road between Dover and Maidstone. In addition to Lenham village there are several hamlets on both the North Downs and the Wealden Greensand and numerous scattered, isolated farmsteads, especially within the latter area (Fig. 6). The differences in landscape across the parish are reflected in the patterns of fields; a band of large, relatively regular fields runs across the parish east-west at the foot of the scarp slope (the Hollingbourne Vale) above which the fields are generally small to medium in scale and irregular in form, suggestive of piecemeal enclosure. Smaller irregularly-shaped fields predominate in the south-western part of the parish, around Greenhill and Elmstone Hole, but the southern part of the parish is characterised by a landscape of medium-scale irregular, piecemeal enclosure. These variations in landscape character within the parish offer the opportunity to examine at a small scale how farmsteads relate to landscape in terms of farm size and density, plan type and the date of farmsteads as evidenced by surviving historic buildings.
There were a number of early manors in the parish including the principal manor of Lenham, represented by Lenham Court (also known as Court Farm) located within the village, and East Lenham for which there are pre-Conquest references and three further Domesday estates; West Shelve, now called New Shelve, and two called East Shelve, one being Old Shelve and the other represented by Cobham Farm. In the southern part of the parish there were medieval manors at Runham and Royton which had a free chapel and was later known as Chapel Farm. On the chalk was the manor of Downe, later called Down Court.
The distribution of farmsteads across the parish shows that there is a higher proportion of farmsteads retaining seventeenth-century, or earlier, recorded buildings within the Wealden Greensand than in the North Downs. There is also a particularly high number of pre-1600 farmsteads in the areas south of the Hollingbourne Vale, where 40 per cent of farmsteads retain a pre-1600 farmhouse but only one site retains a working farm building of this date.
The Hollingbourne Vale is a large scale landscape of large and very large fields (over 50ha) with a low density of farmsteads set along the spring line, a pattern that continues eastwards. In the mid-nineteenth century these included Lenham Court (201a), Court Farm (224a), Tanyard Farm, East Lenham, New Shelve (348a) and Old Shelve (191a).66 Three of these farmsteads have seventeenth-century farmhouses, Court Farm in Lenham also having a large and important fourteenth-century aisled barn. These farmsteads were located on large and mostly high-status farms that were present by the end of the eleventh century and which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries probably had access to capital to allow for the reconstruction of their farmsteads, many having medium to large scale regular multi-yard plans by the end of the nineteenth century (Fig. 6).
Within the North Downs there are only two farmstead sites which retain seventeenth-century or earlier buildings; High Farm and Honeywood Farm. These were two relatively small farmsteads, of 22½ and 38 acres respectively, in the mid-nineteenth century. They are of particular interest in that they stand side-by-side at the south end of West Street, each having fifteenth-century farmhouses. These houses are not identical but are very similar in form and both were associated with loose courtyard (one side) plans and show that the enclosure of the downs was underway by the late medieval period. The similarities in the form and plan type of these two farm houses, in adjacent plots, suggests the control of an estate or land owner creating relatively small farms on the downs. However, whilst Honeywood Farm consisted of a consolidated block of land adjacent to the farmstead, High Farm held a number of small blocks of fields detached from the farmstead, some of which now lie outside of the modern parish. The scattered distribution of the fields of High Farm are not suggestive of new holdings being created from former open Downland in which case a consolidated, ring-fenced holding or a more even distribution of fields might be expected.
Dispersed plan farmsteads are present in both the North Downs and Wealden Greensand areas but the principal concentration by the late nineteenth century was in the south-east of the parish around Lenham Heath. In this area these farmsteads were typical, in terms of their scale, of the small farmsteads that are often found around heathland rather than the wood – pasture landscapes typical of much of the Weald. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, at least two of the higher status farmsteads in the belt at the foot of the scarp had dispersed plans but had been reorganised to form courtyard or regular multi-yard plans by the end of the century.
Goudhurst and Wittersham
Dispersed cluster plans represented the typical layout of farmsteads on farms of all scales in Goudhurst, and as we have seen, the High Weald. Of the 82 farmsteads recorded from the late nineteenth century mapping 45 (53.6 per cent, higher than the average for the High Weald of 43.3 per cent) were dispersed plan types, predominantly cluster plans (Fig. 7). Examination of the tithe map shows that dispersed plans were even more common, representing 58.1 per cent of all farmsteads in the parish in the mid-nineteenth century.67 Wealden dispersed cluster plans are strongly defined by their irregular paddock with the buildings either arranged around the periphery of the paddock, backing onto the boundary, or ‘free-standing’ within the paddock, a feature that is particularly clear on the tithe map. Notably, dispersed cluster plans in Goudhurst are associated with farmsteads of all scales, ranging from one of the largest farms, the 282-acre Forge Farm on the Bedgebury estate, to the 13-acre Stonecrouch Farm. Their dominance across all farmsteads scales suggests that the dispersed cluster plan was the standard farmstead arrangement.
Whilst the development of the High Weald evidences a process of piecemeal woodland clearance by tenants whose tenure was almost freehold, by the mid-nineteenth century the landscape of Goudhurst displayed strong contrasts in ownership and farm size as recorded on the tithe map and apportionment which continued to be noted in the Land Tax returns of 1910 (Fig. 7).68 The south and east of the parish was dominated by large estates divided into holdings of over 100 acres whilst holdings were smaller in the north-west of the parish. The larger size of many of the farmsteads in the south-east of the parish (the three largest were 111 acres, 282 acres and 284 acres but were managed by the same tenants in the mid-nineteenth century) and extensive woodland meant that there was a lower density of farmsteads in these parts of the parish.
By the late nineteenth century there appears to have been a strong correlation between farm size and dispersed plan types in Wittersham; the dispersed multi-yard plans were mostly associated with farms of over 100 acres, whereas dispersed cluster plans were typically associated with farms of less than 50 acres. Underhill Farm, a farm of 167 acres in 1910, was the exception as a dispersed cluster plan, but reference to the tithe map shows that it had developed from a small 25-acre holding and that at both periods the farm was almost entirely pastoral and mainly marshland. This suggests that the farm was predominantly a sheep farm requiring few buildings; the significant increase in size did not mean that a new farmstead was required. At the date of the tithe map 25 of the 43 recorded farmsteads (58 per cent) were dispersed cluster or dispersed multi-yard plan types including the two high status farmsteads of Owlie and Palstre Court, the latter of which remained a dispersed multi-yard plan at the end of the century. Although the number of dispersed plans fell during the second part of the nineteenth century, by 1896 they were still the predominant plan type in the parish representing 54 per cent of recorded farmsteads – much higher than the Kent average of 24 per cent. In contrast to the trend observed elsewhere, six dispersed multi-yard plans shown on the tithe map were classed as dispersed cluster plans from the second edition OS mapping.
Comparison of the farmstead plans between the tithe map and late nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps also gives an indication of the process of change and development. By the end of the century five Goudhurst dispersed cluster plans had developed into dispersed multi-yard plans, one had developed into a dispersed driftway plan, three became loose courtyard plans (one side), and four developed into regular courtyard plans: an L-plan, a U-plan and two regular multi-yard plans. Where farmsteads such as the large steading of Forge Farm or Smugley Farm had developed into dispersed multi-yards by the time of the second edition map, comparison between the two maps suggests that the change was largely due to the addition of yards to existing buildings and often accompanied by the construction of an attached shelter shed to create an L-range within the group. This sometimes resulted in the sub-division of the large enclosure within which the farm buildings stood. At Lower Crowborne a cluster of buildings set within a long, narrow paddock was re-organised to form a regular U-plan, but it is probable that the north range of the U was the earlier barn, the largest building within the cluster, with ranges added to its west and east to create a regular south-facing yard. It is probable that at least some of the dispersed multi-yard plans recorded on the tithe map had similarly developed from dispersed clusters. Dispersed cluster plans also demonstrate their ancient origins through their close association with the presence of seventeenth-century or earlier buildings. Whilst 49 per cent of all farmsteads in Goudhurst have buildings (house or working building) recorded as seventeenth century or earlier, 70 per cent of dispersed cluster plans retain such early buildings.
After dispersed plans, loose courtyard plans were the next most com-mon plan form. These were predominantly smaller examples with build-ings to one side (21 recorded from the tithe map and 13 from the second edition map) and two sides of the yard (9 and 8 respectively), which is a characteristic feature of the High Weald as a whole. There was one loose courtyard (three sides) shown on the tithe map and no groups with buildings to four sides of the yard. By the late nineteenth century there was just one loose courtyard (four sides) representing these larger loose courtyard forms. In percentage terms, loose courtyards formed 32.6 per cent of farmsteads in the mid-nineteenth century, dropping to 26.8 per cent by the end of the century.
Although dispersed plans were found on farms of all sizes, the highest status farms in Goudhurst had developed regular multi-yard plans by the end of the nineteenth century; five were recorded from the second edition mapping, four of which were associated with large farms; Finchcocks on the Scotney Castle Estate (Figs 7 and 8), Home Farm in Bedgebury Park, the former abbey site at Combwell Farm and Chingley Manor. Two of these farmsteads, Finchcocks and Combwell Priory, had regular multi-yard farm plans shown on the tithe map. The fifth example was a small example of the form in the north of the parish. As we have seen, the suggestion from this analysis of a strong relationship between Wealden farmsteads and dispersed farmyard planning is brought into stronger relief when we examine the parish of Wittersham on the edge of Romney Marsh where there appears to have been a strong correlation between farm size and different dispersed plan types.
Conclusion
They turned into Oakleigh drive, which ran along the edge of three grass fields, and finally into the yard. Gammon looked about him quickly and with surprised approval of the permanent, solid-looking square of red-brick buildings and the brick-walled manure-pit in the centre. It was all so different from the haphazardly placed buildings of various materials, but often weather-boarded, which he had known in Kent [Edenbridge and Lyminge].69
This description, by a Victorian visitor from Kent of a farmstead in lowland Derbyshire, highlights a significant theme explored in this article: that the layout of farmsteads, in combination with an understanding of the scale, form and date of farm buildings, reflects farm size and the type of farming practised within an area over time. The recording of plan type has revealed the importance of dispersed plans to Kent and in particular the Weald, their buildings ‘haphazardly placed’ with no obvious signs of planning in their position. Clearly, whilst these plans may appear haphazard to our modern eye, these farmsteads were suited to the way that farmers managed and fed their stock, preserved manure and gained access to surrounding fields, woodland and strips of land for additional fodder and bedding. However, whilst dispersed plans were concentrated in the Weald, the mapping shows that they were a feature of most of the landscapes of Kent beyond the Weald. This stands in complete contrast to the areas that have been mapped to the west and south of the Weald where the distribution of dispersed plans rapidly fades away and they typically represent farmsteads of different character – small heathland-edge farmsteads of relatively late date where the farmers, who were often engaged in other industrial activities, could use common or heathland areas for grazing of stock. The suggestion is that there was more to the dispersed plans of the Weald and Kent than just functionality; these plans possibly represent a cultural tradition that was being eroded in the nineteenth century. Some farmers adapted their dispersed plan farmsteads to create courtyard groups, sometimes reorganising around an existing barn, but many held on to their dispersed steadings. The larger scale of the Wealden dispersed plans and possibly the higher quality of their buildings, probably accounts for the better rates of survival than is the case beyond the Weald.
Although documentary, map and field evidence shows that many farms comprised no more than a house and barn until the late eighteenth century, it is clear that the variety of farmstead plan types in existence by the tithe maps, and as they developed until the end of the century, resulted from anciently-rooted patterns of landscape and farming practice.70 The range of farmstead types, and the way that they relate to broad differences in land use across the county, serve as a reminder that understanding the working areas of the farmstead (in terms of access and the movement of livestock, especially cattle, and harvested produce) is as important as the survey of their buildings, and that understanding the whole group provides an effective means of framing and questioning the historical relationship of farmsteads to their landscapes. The case studies also show that the reordering of Kent’s farmsteads was intimately linked to the amalgamation of farms in the nineteenth century, including the development of dispersed cluster into multi-yard and courtyard plans. The archaeology of all these plan types is a framework for deepening below parish level our understanding of local variation in farm size, the labour force and how farmers have regarded their place in rural society.
endnotes
1 Edwards, B. with Lake, J. and Banister N., 2012, Kent Farmsteads and Landscape Project, Kent County Council, English Heritage and Forum Heritage Services.
2 Martin, D. and Martin, B., 2006, Farm Buildings of the Weald, 1450-1750, Heritage Publications, Kings Lynn; Pearson, S., 1994, Medieval Houses of Kent. An Historical Analysis, RCHME, London; Pearson, S., 2006, ‘Kent: History, Houses and the Hearth Tax’, in Barnwell, P. and Airs, M. (eds), Houses and the Hearth Tax: the Later Stuart House and Society,English Heritage and the CBA, York, 46-54; Quiney, A., 1993, Kent Houses, Antique Collectors Book Club, Woodbridge; Rigold, S., 1966, ‘Some Major Kentish Barns’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 81, 1-30; Abbayad, J., Azzam, K. and Whitter, S., 1985, ‘Littlebourne Barn’, Traditional Kent Buildings, 4, 27-35; Brown, F., 1980, ‘Aisled Timber Barns in East Kent’, Traditional Kent Buildings, 1, 22-8.
Barns have been the principal subject of study, a notable exception being a study of shepherds’ huts on Romney Marsh (Reeves, A. and Eve, D., 1998, ‘Sheep-Keeping and Lookers’-Huts on Romney Marsh’, in Romney Marsh: Environmental Change and Human Occupation in a Coastal Lowland (ed. J. Eddison, M. Gardiner and A. Long), OUCA Monograph 46, The Romney Marsh Research Trust, Sevenoaks, 191-206.
3 Everitt, A., 1986, Continuity and Colonisation: the evolution of Kentish settlement, Leicester University Press, 142-43.
4 Roberts, B.K. and S. Wrathmell, 2000, An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England, English Heritage, London; Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S., 2002, Region and Place. A study of English rural settlement,English Heritage, London.
5 Everitt, 1986, op. cit. (see note 3), 179-180.
6 Brandon, P.F., 1988, ‘South-eastern England’, in Hallam, H.E. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. II, 1042-1350, CUP, 316.
7 Harvey, P.D.A., 1991, ‘The Home Counties’, in Miller, E. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume III 1350-1500,CUP, 132.
8 Wooldridge, S.W. and F. Goldring, 1953, The Weald,Collins, London, 237.
9 Harvey, 1991, op. cit. (see note 7), 132-4.
10 Whyman, J., 2004, ‘Agricultural Developments 1700-1900’, in Lawson, T. and Killingray, D. (eds), An Historical Atlas of Kent, Phillimore, Chichester, 108.
11 Chalklin, C.W., 2004, ‘The Growth of Urban Kent, 1700-1901’, in An Historical Atlas of Kent, 100-101, 123; Everitt, 1986, op. cit. (see note 3), 53; Brandon, P., 2005, The North Downs, Phillimore, Chichester, 226-7.
12 Chalklin, C.W., 1995, ‘The Towns’, in A. Armstrong (ed.), The Economy of Kent, 1640-1914,Woodbridge, KCC, 206.
13 Lawson, T., 2004, ‘Rural Population Trends to 1901’, in Lawson and Killingray (2004), An Historical Atlas of Kent, Phillimore, Chichester, 102.
14 Everitt A., 1976, ‘The Making of the Agrarian Landscape of Kent’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 102, 15.
15 Charles Whitehead, an agricultural writer (‘A sketch of the Agriculture of Kent’ Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 3rd Ser., x (1899)) quoted in ibid., 5.
16 Shaw-Taylor, L., 2005, ‘Family farms and capitalist farms in mid nineteenth-century England’, Agricultural History Review,53.2, 169.
17 The methodology for recording their historic character, how they have changed and relate to the landscape was first developed in Hampshire. Each record noted the recorded date of buildings (primarily from listed building data), the farmstead’s plan form (split into primary and secondary attributes), the siting of the farmhouse in relation to the farmyard, the degree of survival and its location, specifically whether the farmstead lay in a village, hamlet or isolated location. See Lake, J. and Edwards B., 2006, ‘Farmsteads and Landscape: Towards an Integrated View’, Landscapes, 7.1, 1-36.
18 The term North Kent Plain for the area between the North Kent Downs and the northern coastal marshes has been use for this article because it is consistent with the terminology used for the National Character Areas.
19 Countryside Agency, 1999, Countryside Character, Vol. 7: South-East and London, Countryside Agency, Cheltenham. For more details on the National Character Areas, see www.naturalengland.org.uk/publications/nca/default.aspx.Accessed 19 November 2012.
20 Babtie Group and Kent County Council, 2004, Landscape Assessment of Kent, KCC, Maidstone; Croft, A., Munby J. and Ridley, M., 2001, Kent Historic Landscape Character-isation, Final Report, 3 vols, Kent County Council and English Heritage.
21 10.4 per cent of farmsteads have experienced minimal change since the late nineteenth century; 36.4 per cent have had some loss but retained more than 50 per cent of their historic plan form; 25.2 per cent have experienced significant change and retain less than 50 per cent of their historic plan form; 16 per cent have lost all their working farm buildings, retaining only the farmhouse; 1 per cent have lost all their buildings; 11 per cent have been completely lost or redeveloped. Across the West Midlands, where all farmsteads have been mapped using the same methodology, 66% of farmsteads have retained more than 50% of their historic footprint (see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/wmidlandsfarmsteads).
22 Kent Farmsteads Survey Report, 1994, 14 (report in Kent Historic Environment Record). This resulted from a survey of farmsteads across the county, co-ordinated by Jane Wade of the School of Architecture at Canterbury College of Art and carried out by Jo Cox and John Thorp of Keystone Historic Building Consultants. Records of each farmstead have been deposited in English Heritage’s National Archive in Swindon.
23 For an analysis of the use of listed farm buildings at a national scale, see Gaskell, P. and Owen, S., 2005, Historic Farm Buildings: Building the Evidence Base, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham. For analysis of the use of all historic farmsteads in the High Weald AONB, see P. Bibby and P. Brindley, 2007, Historic Farm Complexes in Current Socio-Economic Context: a Pilot Study, Report for High Weald AONB and English Heritage.
24 Lake, J. and Edwards, B., 2007, ‘Buildings and Place: Farmsteads and the Mapping of Change’, Vernacular Architecture, 37, 33-49.
25 48 per cent of farmsteads retaining farmstead character in Kent include a listed building of seventeenth-century or earlier date compared to 30 per cent across the other areas mapped across southern England (East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire).
26 Lake and Edwards, 2007, op. cit. (see note 24), 33-49.
27 Pearson, 1994, op. cit. (see note 2), 132-4.
28 Ibid., 116-127; Pearson 2006, op. cit. (see note 2), 47-8; also see Harrington, D., Pearson, S., and Rose, S., 2000, Kent Hearth Tax Assessment Lady Day 1664, Kent Records29, London, British Record Society.
29Pearson, 1994, op. cit. (see note 2), 119.
30 Pearson, 2004, op. cit. (see note 2), 52.
31 Pearson 1994, op. cit. (see note 2), 7-8, 139-40.
32 Ibid., 120-1.
33 Brandon, 2005, op. cit. (see note 11), 216.
34 See Bannister, N.R., 1995, Historic Landscape Survey of the Wye College Estate, Kent, 2 vols, unpubl. report for English Heritage; also Brookes, S., 2007, Economics and Social Change in Anglo-Saxon Kent AD 400-900. Landscapes Communities and Exchange, BAR British Series 431, 70.
35 Percentages of farmsteads retaining seventeenth- century or earlier buildings: Greater Thames Estuary 24.9, North Kent Plain 34.4, North Downs 39.7, Wealden Greensand 51.3, Low Weald 47.0, High Weald 53.7, Romney Marsh 18.5.
36 Edwards, B., 2005, Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in Hampshire Project, Forum Heritage Services, unpubl. report for English Heritage; Edwards, B., 2006, Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in West Sussex. Forum Heritage Services, unpubl. report for the High Weald Joint Advisory Committee, West Sussex County Council and English Heritage; Edwards, B., 2008a, Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in The High Weald AONB. Forum Heritage Services, unpubl. report for the High Weald Joint Advisory Committee and English Heritage; Edwards, B., 2008b, Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in East Sussex, Forum Heritage Services, unpubl. report for the High Weald Joint Advisory Committee, English Heritage and East Sussex County Council.
37 Martin and Martin, 1982, op. cit. (see note 2), 8-9; Ibid. Everitt 1986, 54.
38 Martin and Martin, 1982, op. cit. (see note 2), 4, 9.
39 Chalklin, C.W., 1962, ‘The Rural Economy of a Kentish Wealden Parish, 1650-1750’, Agricultural History Review, 10.1, 35-6.
40 Noted in Pearson, 1994, op. cit. (see note 2), 118-120.
41 Ibid., 141-3.
42 Brandon, P., 2003, The Kent and Sussex Weald, Phillimore, Chichester, 64.
43 Du Boulay, F.R.H., 1963-4, ‘A rentier economy in the later Middle Ages. The archbishopric of Canterbury’, Economic History Review (2nd series), 16, 427-38.
44 Everitt, 1976, op. cit. (see note 14), 5.
45 Everitt 1986, op. cit. (see note 3), 58-61. For the structure of Romney farming society see also Draper, G., 1998, ‘The Farmers of Canterbury Cathedral Priory and All Souls College on Romney Marsh c. 1443-1545’, in Romney Marsh: Environmental Change and Human Occupation in a Coastal Lowland (ed. J. Eddison, M. Gardiner and A. Long), OUCA Monograph 46, The Romney Marsh Research Trust, Sevenoaks, 109-28.
46 Everitt 1986, op. cit. (see note 3), 61.
47 Thirsk, J. (ed.), 1984, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. vi (1640-1750, Regional Farming Systems), CUP, 60.
48 An example is Hode Farm, Patrixbourne, which developed from one of the estate farms of St Augustine’s Abbey. Here a large L-shaped aisled barn, extended in the eighteenth century from a fifteenth century core, forms the corner of a yard which has developed with additional buildings (a cart shed attached to the barn) and a detached cow house and stable which have retained a formal layout. The house, typically for such a large-scale farmstead, is detached from the farmyard. See Beck, S., Doyle, G., Edwards, A. and Wittich, A., 1981, ‘Hode Farm, Patrixbourne’, Traditional Kent Buildings, 2, 5-10.
49 See Melling E. (ed.), 1965, Some Kentish Houses, Kentish Sources No. 5, Maidstone, KCC, 6, 71-2, for a gentrification of a vicarage.
50 For example, regular U-plans have 77.6% of farmsteads with the house detached compared to smaller loose courtyard plans; 61.4% (1 side) and 64.8% (2 sides). The larger loose courtyard types with buildings to three sides had 71.8% of farmhouses detached and those with buildings to four sides of the yard had 79.1% of sites with the farmhouse detached. Full regular courtyard plans had 85% of sites with the farmhouse detached.
51 Brown, F.E., 1984, ‘Aisled Timber Barns in East Kent’, Traditional Kent Buildings 1, 22-8.
52 Edwards, B., 2005 Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in Hampshire Project. Forum Heritage Services; Edwards, B., 2006, Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in West Sussex; Edwards, B., 2008b, Historic Farmsteads and Landscape Character in East Sussex, Forum Heritage Services.
53 Brandon, 2003, op. cit. (see note 42), Phillimore, Chichester, 25.
54 Wooldridge and Goldring 1953, op. cit. (see note 8), 235; Martin and Martin, 1982, op. cit. (see note 2), 13.
55 Brandon, 2003, op. cit. (see note 42), 129-40. Brandon stresses the importance of agri-forestry and a flexible farming economy in the Weald (p. 88), cattle being grazed within harvested woodland and a continual supply of timber being cropped from woodland and shaws (pp. 54 and 62).
56 Long grass leys and strong market-led variations in the amount of land ploughed for corn being a strong feature of Wealden farming. Before the late eighteenth century most of the arable was devoted to the production of animal feeds, but despite a marked increase in arable production until the 1860s. (Wooldridge & Goldring 1953, op. cit. (see note 8), 235; Martin and Martin, 1982, op. cit. (see note 2), 13.
57 Martin and Martin, 2006, op. cit. (see note 2), 39-58.
58 Shaw-Taylor, 2005, op. cit. (see note 16), 168.
59 See, for example, Melling, 1965, op. cit. (see note 49), 53; Melling, E. (ed.), 1961, Aspects of Agriculture and Industry, Kentish Sources No. 3. Maidstone, KCC, 72.
60 Rigold, S., 1973, ‘The distribution of aisled timber barns’, Vernacular Architecture 2, 20-22.
61 Croft, Munby and Ridley, 2001, op. cit. (see note 20). HLC interprets key historic maps, aerial photographs and other data-sets, in order to map present day (and where information is available) and past historic landscape character. For more details on English Heritage’s Characterisation programme see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/research/landscapes-and-areas/characterisation/historic-landscape-character/ Accessed 19 November 2012.
62 The HLC of the Hoo Peninsula was developed as a pilot for creating a fine-grained HLC from the present broad-brush Kent HLC http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/research/landscapes-and-areas/archaeological-field-survey-and-investigation/hoo-peninsula/ Accessed 19 November 2012.
63 Irregular informal fields (those with an irregular pattern often with wavy boundaries) tend to occur in small pockets in valleys or along the edge of the marshes, for example at Cliffe or at Lower Higham. These are typical of small meadows and pastures and rarely occur close to farmsteads.
64 A sign of the vulnerability of dispersed plans in this area to change, probably a result of their smaller scale (relative to the Weald in particular) and that of the buildings within them, is that of the four dispersed cluster plans existing in the late nineteenth century only two of the dispersed cluster plans recorded from the second edition OS maps have retained any farmstead character, one of which has lost less than 50% of its historic form.
65 Hasted, E., 1797-9, The History & Topographical Survey of Kent, www.british-history.ac.uk/ Accessed 23 December 2012.
66 Lenham Tithe map, Canterbury Cathedral Archives, DCb-T/O/L/5B.
67 Goudhurst Tithe map, Canterbury Cathedral Archives, DCb-T/O/G/3B.
68 National Archives, IR 124/8/350 for Goudhurst; National Archives, IR 124/8/328 for Wittersham.
69 Layberry, L.G.J., 1983, A Pocket Full of Rye, Midas Books, 40.
70Melling, E. (ed.), 1961, op. cit (see note 59), 3, 26-7, 30.
Fig. 1 The National Landscape Character Areas of Kent. Based upon Ordnance Survey material with the permission of the OS on behalf of the Controller, HMSO © Crown Copyright 2011, 100019238.
TABLE 1. REGIONAL SURVIVAL RATES OF HISTORIC FARMSTEAD FORMS SINCE 1895 (PER CENT)
|
No. farmsteads in 1895 |
% farmsteads unchanged or moderately altered |
% farmsteads showing considerable loss of historic form |
% farmsteads where only farmhouse survives |
% farmsteads with no historic buildings surviving |
% farmsteads completely disappeared |
|
|
High Weald |
849 |
61.8 |
22.5 |
10.0 |
0.2 |
5.2 |
|
Low Weald |
1,324 |
61.5 |
19.7 |
11.1 |
0.7 |
6.9 |
|
Greensand Hills |
1,046 |
48.0 |
25.1 |
14.4 |
1.2 |
11.1 |
|
North Downs |
1,556 |
41.6 |
30.1 |
17.0 |
1.5 |
9.8 |
|
North Kent Plain |
1,202 |
33.2 |
25.9 |
20.3 |
1.2 |
19.2 |
|
Romney Marsh |
293 |
32.0 |
28.0 |
25.6 |
2.7 |
11.6 |
|
Thames marshes |
232 |
26.3 |
26.2 |
19.7 |
0.9 |
26.6 |
|
Kentish Total |
6,502 |
46.8 |
25.2 |
15.6 |
1.1 |
11.2 |
Fig. 3b Examples of Dispersed plan types – l-n.
Fig. 3c Examples of other plan types – o-r.
|
% Dispersed Form |
% Courtyard Form |
Other* |
|
|
High Weald |
44.1 |
51.3 |
4.6 |
|
Romney Marsh |
35.8 |
61.2 |
3.0 |
|
Low Weald |
35.1 |
60.6 |
4.3 |
|
Greensand Hills |
23.4 |
74.5 |
2.1 |
|
North Downs |
16.4 |
81.8 |
1.8 |
|
North Kent Plain |
12.2 |
85.7 |
2.1 |
|
Thames marshes |
9.9 |
87.9 |
2.2 |
|
Kentish total |
24.9 |
72.4 |
2.7 |
* Farmsteads having working buildingsattached in-line to the house or laid out in linear fashion.
Fig. 4 These drawings show the functional distinctions between dispersed farm-stead plans typical of the Weald and (this page) the courtyard farmsteads typical of large farms in arable areas.
Fig 4a A loose courtyard plan with working buildings arranged around two sides of the yard. The harvested corn crop was brought into the barn for threshing. The threshed grain was then stored in granaries. In this example the seed corn is stored in a staddle granary (a feature of the Downland and arable vales of Kent) whilst grain for market is stored above a cartshed which typically faces onto a track. Straw from the threshed crop was then taken from the barn to be trodden down into manure in cattle yards and associated cattle housing and stabling. It was then returned to fertilise the fields.
(Drawings © Bob Edwards and Chantal Freeman.)
